Oil spill related contaminant data for Arctic marine mammals - Obtaining baseline oil spill-related contaminant exposure data for Arctic marine mammals

With increasing oil exploration and ship traffic in the U.S. Arctic, there is concern about the increased potential for an oil spill event in this region of the world. Baseline exposure levels of oil-spill related contaminants are lacking for marine mammals, particularly endangered or threatened populations (e.g., ice seals, bowhead whales). Identification of the appropriate tissues/fluids to assess recent exposure of marine mammals to oil components must be determined, as well as the type of oil spill-related contaminant (e.g., parent polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), metabolites of PAHs). To help address these data gaps, various matrices of Arctic marine mammals will be collected during subsistence harvests and from fresh dead stranded animals over the next year and these samples will be analyzed for oil-spill related compounds. These tissues will also be analyzed for additional oil-spill related components after the methods have been developed and validated. Under the guidance of NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources, we will collaborate with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop and test appropriate standard reference materials and control materials for these analyses to ensure that the chemical contaminant data generated for this project are of known and acceptable quality.

Concentrations of PAHs and alkylated PAHs in Arctic marine mammal tissues.

Subject to Public Access to Research Results (PARR): No: Fully Non-NOAA Funded

Data: Oil spill related contaminant data for Arctic marine mammals.

Contact the data owner - Washington State Dept. of Fish & Wildlife. At this time, contact the Data Manager for information on obtaining access to this data set. In the near future, the NWFSC will strive to provide all non-sensitive data resources as a web service in order to meet the NOAA Data Access Policy Directive (https://nosc.noaa.gov/EDMC/PD.DA.php).

Data in password-protected database behind the NWFSC firewall.

Sloan et al. 2006 Tech Memo NMFS-NWFSC-77. These data were collected and processed in accordance with established protocols and best practices under the direction of the project’s Principal Investigator. Contact the dataset Data Manager for full QA/QC methodology.

No Delay

The Northwest Fisheries Science Center facilitates backup and recovery of all data and IT components which are managed by IT Operations through the capture of static (point-in-time) backup data to physical media. Once data is captured to physical media (every 1-3 days), a duplicate is made and routinely (weekly) transported to an offsite archive facility where it is maintained throughout the data's applicable life-cycle.

Krahn et al. 1984; Sloan et al. 2014 Tech Memo NMFS-NWFSC-125; da Silva et al. 2013