July 6, 2018 — Eight years ago, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank off Louisiana, one of the big problems facing scientists trying to assess the damage caused by the oil spill was that no one knew much about what lives in the Gulf of Mexico.
That’s no longer a problem, according to the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Sciences.
Partially funded by money that BP had to pay in the wake of the 2010 disaster, USF scientists joined with colleagues from three other universities to put together the first-ever comprehensive look at what fish and other wildlife call the gulf their home.
Compiling the data for their study, just published in the scientific journal Marine and Coastal Fisheries, required 12 separate voyages over seven years on the USF research ship R/V Weatherbird II. That included two trips to Mexico and one to Cuba, according to lead research scientist Steve Murawski of USF.
During those voyages the scientists caught 15,000 fish of 166 species from 343 locations. They tested the specimens for oil residues and other pollutants. Overall, the degree of oil contamination of fish from the northern gulf continues to decline, the report said, but none of the areas assessed so far have been free of oil.
One surprise in their findings, Murawski said, was that the part of the gulf with the lowest diversity of fish species is the area of the gulf with the greatest number of offshore oil rigs.
“They’ve had 50 to 60 years of oil development there,” he said. “So that may be one of the at-risk areas” in case of a future oil spill. A disaster like Deepwater Horizon could more easily wipe out the fish living there to the point where they could not bounce back, he explained.