Deepwater Horizon Still Killing Fish & Plants; Spills' Enduring Effects Larger Than Thought

[hatrack]

Jeffrey Short has been asking the same question for nearly three decades: What happened to the herring? After the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill off Alaska’s southern coast, the fish ― a vital link in the food chain and resource for the local economy ― began disappearing. Yet Short, a scientist stationed in Alaska for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, struggled to connect the dots between the spill and the herring population crash.

Now his latest study ― one of two published this month examining how the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster affects animal and plant life in Gulf of Mexico ― offers some clues. The spill, caused by a BP oil well that blew out and gushed 200 million gallons of crude for 87 days straight, killed thousands of mammals and sea turtles and more than 1 million birds. Without those predators, schools of fish rapidly multiplied, straining an ecosystem not designed to handle populations of that size. The number of menhaden, a species of fish in the herring family known colloquially as bunker or pogies, roughly doubled in a year.

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The ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico also may never recover, Short said. “So far, it looks like the Gulf menhaden population is permanently in what I’d call a hyper-abundant state, which means they’re continuing to be chronically under-nourished and consume a lot of the productivity in the ecosystem,” he said. “It’s not impossible, but it may be an irreversible effect.” He added: “We think it’s by far the biggest ecological effect, on the surface at least, of the Deepwater Horizon … This is something that happens across many thousands of square kilometers, from Alabama almost to Texas.”

Another study released in July suggests the effects of the BP spill are taking a worse toll on shore than previously thought. After the spill, oil seeped into the Louisiana wetlands and became buried under plants. Now, researchers at the American Society of Agronomy found that the oil slows the intake of oxygen through the plant roots, according to their study published in the Social Science Society of America Journal. “This delay in oxygen availability caused by oil can increase stress on wetland plants, unable to supply enough oxygen to their root system,” the researchers wrote in a press release. “This stress can contribute to accelerated loss of marsh area through erosion in a region where marshes are already rapidly disappearing″ due to a rise in sea levels.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-studies-show-how-the-2010-gulf-oil-spill-still-starves-fish-at-sea-and-plants-on-shore_us_596e210ce4b010d77673edce?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. We KNEW the Gulf was basically doomed, even back then.

It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out the rate and amount of oil spewing into the Gulf for so very long was gonna impact land and Gulf. Plus the Corexit they were spraying for weeks and weeks,.
Then add the lies of BP about how much oil, how much corexit they were pouring into the Gulf....lie after lie, BP even hired it's own "security" military to force people off and away from the public beaches while they were collecting all the overnight oil tht had washed up.
Meanwhile the stupid public kept going to the beaches, kept finding oil blobs stuck to their feet, so much so that outdoor faucets appeared so you could rinse off your oil soaked feet as you left the beach.

I don't even want to go into how much contaminated fish and shrimp were being sold.

When the promised, tho much reduced settlement with BP hit the state, our adulterous gov. grabbed a hunk of that money to fix up the state beachhouse so he could have privacy with his mistress.
No "little" people got much money, and certainly not enough to ever compensate for a toxic gulf, or for the hundreds of miles of destroyed wetlands that will allow huge storms to penetrate that much further inland.

I am just as furious now as I was then.