Mass death at the the base of the Gulf food web

[Barrett808]

Tiniest victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may turn out to be most important

..."The top two millimeters of that marsh muck is where the action is in a coastal estuary," said Kevin Carman, dean of the College of Basic Sciences at LSU. "That's the base, the food that fuels the whole system. If you lose that in a large enough area it could have a disproportionate impact on the food web, and everything that depends on it: fish, shrimp, oysters, all the species that rely on the estuary." ... Scientists worry how well it would cope with the giant oil spill that could be washing ashore for weeks on end, because that has never happened before. However, they can paint a worst-case scenario from the many smaller, inland spills that have hit state's interior coastal wetlands during the 80 years the oil industry has been here.

It's a frightening picture.

"If the toxic components of the oil kill those invertebrates foraging on the algae, then the algae will grow out of control," Carman said. "The analogy would be if you removed cattle grazing in a field, the grasses would just take over. Same thing here."

The algae eventually would form a thick mat over the marsh mud, preventing sunlight and oxygen from penetrating below its surface.

"That would make it harder for anything to grow in the sediments below," he said.

[Karenina]

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