Links
World's largest dead zone suffocating sea
"Eagle!" The shout goes up as a great shadow sweeps over our boat. The white-tailed eagle makes its descent to one of the 24,000 islands that make up Sweden's pine-covered, rocky Stockholm Archipelago.
The tourists on board for this nature tour in August 2009 mostly miss the photo opp. But local wildlife expert Peter Westman, of the conservation group WWF Sweden, assures the group that there will be others.
Numbers of this once-threatened predator have soared from 1,000 to more than 23,000 in the Baltic Sea since pollutants including DDT, an eggshell-thinning pesticide, and PCBs, chemical compounds used in electrical equipment, were banned in the 1970s, Westman said.
But there is a new danger to the eagle and many other marine species: An explosion of microscopic algae called phytoplankton has inundated the Baltic's sensitive waters, sucking up oxygen and choking aquatic life.