Page 24n Thursday, April 26, 2012
NATION & WORLD
2 years later, sick fish at oil spill site
By CAIN BURDEAU Associated Press
Parasitic infections. Chewed-up-looking fins. Gashes. Mysterious black streaks. Two years after the drilling-rig explosion that touched off the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, scientists are begin- ning to suspect that fish in the Gulf of Mexico are suffering the effects of the petroleum. The evidence is nowhere near con-
clusive. But if those suspicions prove correct, it could mean that the environ- mental damage to the Gulf from the BP disaster is still unfolding and the picture isn’t as rosy as it might have seemed just a year ago. And the damage may extend well
BARATARIA BAY, La. — Open sores.
problems could be devastating to some prized types of fish and to the people who make their living catching them. There’s no saying for sure what’s caus-
ing the diseases in what is still a relatively small percentage of the fish. The Gulf is assaulted with all kinds of contaminants every day. Moreover, scientists have no baseline data on sick fish in the Gulf from before the spill. The first comprehensive research may be years from publication. Still, it’s clear to fishermen and re-
searchers alike that something’s amiss. n A recent batch of test results re-
Associated Press
beyond fish. In the past year, research has emerged showing deep-water coral, seaweed beds, dolphins, mangroves and other species of plants and animals are suffering. “There is lots of circumstantial evi-
dence that something is still awry,” said Christopher D’Elia, dean of Louisiana State University’s School of the Coast and Environment. “On the whole, it is not as much environmental damage as originally projected. Doesn’t mean there is none.” Reports of strange things with fish be-
vealed the presence of oil in the bile ex- tracted from fish caught in August 2011, nearly 15 months after the well blew out on April 20, 2010, in a disaster that killed 11 men. “Bile tells you what a fish’s last meal
was,” said Steve Murawski, a marine biologist with the University of South Florida and former chief science adviser for the National Marine Fisheries Ser- vice. “There was as late as August of last year an oil source out there that some of those animals were consuming.” Bile in red snapper, yellow-edge grou-
A fish pulled from the Gulf of Mexico is seen with unusual lesions and infections.
environmental contamination, accord- ing to Murawski, the lead researcher. The number of sick fish rose as scien- tists moved west away from the relatively clean waters of Florida, and also as they pushed into deeper waters off Alabama, Mississippi and especially Louisiana, near where the Deepwater Horizon rig sank. About 10 percent of mud-dwelling
gan emerging when fishermen returned to the Gulf weeks after BP’s gushing oil well was capped during the summer of 2010. They started catching grouper and red snapper with large open sores and strange black streaks, lesions they said they had never seen. They promptly blamed the spill. The illnesses are not believed to pose any health threat to humans. But the
per and a few other species contained on average 125 parts per million of naphthalene, a compound in crude oil, Murawski said. Scientists expect to find almost none of the substance in fish cap- tured in the open ocean. n Last summer, a federally funded
team of scientists conducted what ex- perts say is the most extensive study yet of sick fish in shallow and deep Gulf wa- ters. Over seven cruises in July and Au- gust, the scientists caught about 4,000 fish, from Florida’s Dry Tortugas to Louisiana. About 3 percent of the fish had gash- es, ulcers and parasites symptomatic of
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tile fish caught in the DeSoto Canyon, to the northeast of the well, showed signs of sickness. “The closer to the oil rig, the higher
the frequency was” of sick fish, Murawski said. Past studies off the Atlantic Seaboard
found about 1 percent of fish suffering from diseases, Murawski said. But he said that figure cannot really be used for comparisons with the Gulf, whose warmer waters serve as an incubator for bacteria and parasites that can cause le- sions and other illnesses. n Laboratory work over the past win-
ter on the USF samples indicates the im- mune systems of the fish were impaired by an unknown environmental stress or
contamination. Other researchers say they have come to similar conclusions. “Some of the things I’ve seen over the
BAKKEN BREAKOUT WEEKLY
past year or so I’ve never seen before,” said Will Patterson, a marine biologist at the University of South Alabama and at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. “Things like fin rot, large open sores on fish, those were some of the more disturbing types of things we saw. Different changes in pigment, red snapper with large black streaks on them.” Teasing out what might have been
caused by the spill and what is normal will be tricky, and that’s the challenge scientists now face. Deformities, diseases and sudden shifts in fish numbers are regular occurrences in nature. For exam- ple, scientists are not sure what to make of reports from fishermen of eyeless or otherwise deformed shrimp and crabs. “I’ve heard everything but shrimp
with two heads,” said Jerald Horst, a ma- rine biologist retired from LSU AgCen- ter who writes books about the Gulf. “I listen respectfully. Reports can be useful but are not proof in themselves of cause Continued on next page
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