How much of an
oil slick could you possibly have, since the whole recipe (over a gallon of soup) has 1/2 cup
oil total, which you would mix thoroughly into the finished soup before serving.
So researchers turned to two different estimation methods — one whereby
total mortalities were estimated from the actual number of dead birds recovered, and another in which information on the geographic extent of the
oil slick and seabird densities were used to estimate potential mortalities.