The fate of the Gulf of Mexico is in the hands of robot submarines. These Remotely Operated Vehicles, or ROVs, are piloted from control cabins on the oil-sheened surface. Technicians steer the bots via joysticks that, according to BP, are “much like the ones used to control characters in computer games.” BP boasts that some of these robots are sophisticated enough to pick up an egg without breaking it.
 
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Off the southern coast of Louisiana, among the mangroves of Queen Bess Island, brown pelican eggs are coated with rust-colored slime. Cleanup workers must be careful to avoid accidentally crushing the delicate nests with their boots. Biologists face a dilemma: take the soiled adult birds from their nests and sacrifice the next generation, or leave the parents and save the eggs.
 
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“The Workhorse of the Gulf of Mexico” is The Millennium® Plus ROV, built by Oceaneering International, a company founded in Houston, Texas, in 1965. Oceaneering’s subsea technology is implemented primarily in West Africa, Norway, the United Kingdom, Asia, Australia, Brazil, and the United States. Its Advanced Technologies segment also serves defense and aerospace industries. The Millennium® Plus ROV, codeveloped with the space-systems group, makes use of “the latest and greatest” technology for improved performance and maintainability. The Millennium® Plus is capable of completing maneuvers in a deluge of crude oil thanks to its sonar-based navigation system, which BP describes as “similar to the way bats use their own sonar systems to negotiate obstacles as they fly.” Similar, also, to the way dolphins navigate murky water.
 
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Dolphins have relied on biosonar for millennia. Their echolocation is so precise that they can distinguish between a quarter and a dime while blindfolded. Echolocation will be useful to dolphins when their eyesight is blurred by oil and dispersants in the gulf. Oil is unlikely to stick to a dolphin, but likely to burn its smooth and sensitive skin. Stressed dolphins, breathing heavily, surface more frequently for air. At the surface, they risk inhaling oil vapors. Chronic exposure may lead to long-term complications, including the transfer of petroleum hydrocarbons to suckling young through mother’s milk.
 
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The Millennium® Plus ROV weighs 8,800 pounds in air and is lowered to the water via crane. Its design includes a dual manipulator, 330-horsepower work class system with an enhanced thruster configuration, which increases lift capacity by more than 50 percent when compared to the standard Millennium ROV work system. Its eight thrusters feature redundant systems, allowing the vehicle to continue operating even in the event of partial thruster failure. The result: 98.9 percent uptime. Telemetry and communication are handled through fiber-optic cables. The ROVs attempting to stem the leak at the Macondo well are “flying” in 5,000 feet of pitch-black 36-degree water, which BP’s Well Site Leader describes as “the toughest, harshest climate on Earth that man can venture into.”
 
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The Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle weighs around a hundred pounds, and with a shell only two feet long, it is sometimes mistaken for a young member of a larger species. Crabs are this sea turtle’s favorite food. The Kemp’s Ridley can live for fifty years, swimming hundreds of miles every one to three years to hatch clutches of eggs, usually on the same beach where it was born. The Kemp’s Ridley depends on the Gulf as its sole breeding ground. Each breeding season, “Turtle Patrols” in Texas comb the sand for nesting turtles. Biologists outfit the turtles with satellite tracking tags, known as passive integrated transducers, which allow researchers to pass a wand over the turtle and view a readout with its number. Some of the Kemp’s Ridleys in the Gulf have been afloat since the 1960s, back when there were only three billion humans on the planet producing twenty-one million barrels of oil per day. These days more than six billion humans produce seventy-five million barrels of oil daily, yet for the time being, the Kemp’s Ridley swims on. Very little is known about the evolution of the Kemp’s Ridley, but sea turtles have been progressing for millions of years. In all likelihood, they began their existence on solid ground, until hostile environments on land forced them into the water.
 
—Christopher Feliciano Arnold