Another week, another (unfunded) oil meeting

By Dr Bik

Well, the title says it all. As the autumn rolls on, two of the PIs working on our Gulf of Mexico RAPID project are currently headed down to New Orleans for meeting number [insert large number here—I’ve stopped counting] related to the oil spill.

Meetings, meetings, meetings. Apparently if you were one of the lucky ones who got RAPID funding, all that hard-earned grant money is going towards travel expenses—because the organizers certainly aren’t covering our backs.

Unfortunately, there are a bunch of reasons why we MUST attend these meetings:
It’s the only way to pester and beg NOAA/BP for post-spill samples, since they ignore our 5,000 email requests

We continue to have no idea what the hell research everyone else is doing, because communication amongst scientists is still disheveled and I don’t have a week to sit down and try to navigate through 50 Deepwater Horizon databases. [Note: I am of the ‘millenial’ generation, and if I can’t get information in <3 clicks it doesn’t exist]

To be the voice for biology, or risk being drowned out by the overwhelming focus on chemical/physical monitoring and analyses. At the meeting in St. Petersburg, NSF told us that they awarded $19.4 million in Deepwater Horizon Rapid grants, yet only $250,000 of this went to study benthic communities (The bulk of the total sum funded instrumentation instead). Yes, it much much harder to measure biological impacts, but they are critically important in the long-term.

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