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By Kevin Zelnio
More than six months after the BP Horizon rig exploded and sank into the waters of Mississippi Canyon, we still have very little understanding of what the impacts will be to deep sea marine life.
As Dr. Bik pointed out, NSF spent just $250,000 on benthic communities out of the $19.4 million Rapid Response grants awarded thus far. While some important work has been carried out with BP funding, there is no denying that the company responsible for this disaster has sought to use its primary funder status to influence the direction of research – and even, in some cases, how and when results are communicated.
These facts, combined with the “mission accomplished/nothing to see here” tone of many government statements on the spill, led Greenpeace to decide there was a need for more independent research to assess the scope and impacts of the BP Horizon disaster.
We started in Florida, looking at sponges with Charles Messing and Joe Lopez from Nova Southeastern University. Because sponges filter large quantities of water, they are a good place to look for impacts of even low concentrations of oil or dispersant, in the form of changes to microbial symbionts.It’ll take six months before the analysis is completed, a good reminder that science is slow, and policy makers should not be too quick to assume they understand much about what the full damage toll will be.
Caz Taylor and Erin Grey of Tulane University have been doing some important work with blue crab larvae, so we were happy to make the ship available to them to conduct several days of plankton tows.That analysis will take quite a while to complete, but they are growing increasingly concerned about the mysterious orange blobs turning up in their samples. If the blobs turn out to be oil or dispersant, this will be bad news for more than the blue crabs, as it will show one way that these contaminants are entering the food chain.
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