The Coast Is Not Clear

[jpak]

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_34/b4192050530507.htm

Visit the Gulf of Mexico today and you'd hardly recognize it as the scene of what President Barack Obama called "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced." It's as if scientists had conducted an insane experiment—dumping some 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean water—and discovered that its effect was in some ways negligible. Some 21 years after the Exxon Valdez disaster, you can still find globs of oil in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Yet the Gulf appears to be scrubbing itself: Sunshine is evaporating—and bacteria are rapidly digesting—the spilled oil. Less crude has infiltrated vulnerable wetlands than was widely feared. Documented fish and bird kills have been small, and most Gulf beaches remain pristine.

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Even experts who are less sanguine see the oil spill as an added burden rather than a knockout blow. Jane Lubchenco, the marine ecologist who heads NOAA, says that the Gulf's waters and coasts "have been undergoing a series of changes over the years that have progressively compromised the health of more and more of the system." Speaking to reporters by phone on Aug. 10 while traveling in the region, she added: "Each of these changes doesn't happen in isolation. This spill interacts with and is on top of the other changes in the Gulf."

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The spill could do its worst damage by exacerbating existing threats. Harm to the bluefin tuna, prized both as a gamefish and as a culinary delicacy retailing for $100 a pound, is the premier example. It ranges the Atlantic but spawns just once a year: precisely where and when the BP spill occurred. The floating beds of brown seaweed that shelter bluefin larvae and fingerlings soak up oil like a sponge. Ocean biologists worry that the spill might have wiped out most of the 2010 generation of Gulf bluefins.

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Another stubborn unknown is the impact of the spill on small fish, such as menhaden, sardines, small jacks, and anchovies, that are food for creatures higher up the chain. Anchovies and menhaden are filter feeders that swim with their mouths agape, catching tiny food particles in their gill filaments. The tiny oil droplets suspended in subsea clouds could kill the fishes' food source, the near-microscopic crustaceans called copepods. The droplets could also clog the fishes' gills. At the same time, oil-eating bacteria could exhaust oxygen supplies in deep waters. Next unknown: If fish in the plumes do die, will others occupy their niche as the pollution clears and oxygen increases? Shipp, of the University of South Alabama, says he thinks the spill should continue to be regarded as Public Enemy No. 1 for the Gulf until those kinds of questions are answered.

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[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. It's "clear" alright.

Crystal.