Oil, you done me wrong.

“President Obama said that the U.S. could “potentially preserve” the Gulf Coast estuaries and marshes “so that, three years from now, things have come back,” a panel of ocean specialists strongly disputed that time frame, calling the 36-month prediction “wildly optimistic.”  Obama made the statement in an interview with Matt Lauer on The Today Show.

–From the FiscalTimes

How bad is the environmental damage to the Gulf?  It’s bad all over, in the marshes and in the water.  I recently read an AP story that reported dolphins and sharks and other larger marine life are now congregating near the shores,  in surprisingly shallow waters off the Gulf coast states.  At least one whale has been found dead, and around 41 dolphins have been found dead.  It is speculated that many of the animals are dying and sinking to the bottom of the Gulf farther out.  Greenpeace reported that dozens of dolphins were seen swimming and playing in oil-sheened water near Grand Isle.

When dolphins move closer in to shore it means that their habitat is extremely polluted, and they are fleeing fouled water in search of a livable environment.  A big danger of oil and dispersant-polluted water in the Gulf is that it may deplete the oxygen, causing mass die-offs of all sizes and kinds of marine life.  It may also make these “dead zones” more or less permanent.

In the following interview, scientist Thomas Shirley describes the damage to the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems.  He’s optimistic the Gulf will recover, though he thinks the damage will be long-term.  After an excerpt of the interview, which is taken from Yale e360, you’ll find a short paper he wrote in May 2010 on the biodiversity of the Gulf.

Interview: The Spill’s Growing Toll On Marine Life in the Gulf of Mexico

Tom Shirley says that, despite the Gulf’s warm waters and indigenous population of oil-eating microbes, the impacts of this oil spill are likely to be felt for a long, long time — especially if a hurricane blows the oil deep into Gulf Coast wetlands. “If this oil spill ends up back in the marsh areas that are nurseries for a lot of these species, we will see very long-term effects,” says Shirley, who also studied the impacts of another famous oil spill — the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska. “Twenty-one years later we still see effects [of the Exxon Valdez]. I predict long-term effects here.”

Yale Environment 360: Given your recent survey of the marine biology of almost the entire Gulf, what’s your assessment of the damage to date?

Thomas Shirley: Well, I really don’t have hard data on damage. The only thing we have so far are body counts of the oiled birds, questionable data about the causes of deaths of many marine turtles and a few marine mammals. But, no doubt with [...]