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So we’ve been working in the Gulf of Mexico in relation to the oil spill. Some of the
issues we’ve been examining are trying to understand what is happening or what has happened
to some of the small organisms that live in the gulf. In particular we are very interested
in what are happening to the organisms that live in between the sand grains.
So before the spill it looked like a typical animal community in terms of the small what
are called meiofauna that live in between the sand grains and then after the spill some
of those same sites show a lot of fungal organisms and a big reduction in some of the other meiofauna
or animal type organisms. One of the challenges we have now is we need
actually more time points to look and see how major of an effect this was and if it
is really damaging to the ecosystem or maybe it was just a quick blip. We don’t know
yet. We need more data to try to determine this.
One of the questions in our mind is are these sites going to return to the way they were
before or a lot of times when you perturb an ecosystem it will return to a steady state,
but a different steady state and that could have implications for changing the whole ecosystem,
the food chain and ultimately how people utilize that food chain.
Our main objective is to study the distribution and the amount of transformation of oil in
affected coastal wetlands, especially in Louisiana in heavy oil areas.
We do know the oil persists in the wetlands but we don’t know how long it will persist.
We know that because of oil spills those bacteria have already responded and immobilized the
heavy metals but we don’t know whether the heavy metals will be immobilized in the future
when the chemical conditions change. The impact on wildlife can be considered an
immediate impact as people see from the media, for example those sea birds with feathers
covered with oil. Essentially they lose the ability to fly and regulate body temperatures.
And you also see the mammals, the sea birds, ingesting those oils and also the dying and
dead coral are found deeply under the sea. So those are immediate impacts. We also need
to consider long-term impacts. As I mentioned our team has found a high, elevated amount
of oil still persists in the wetlands but a long-term impact on wildlife probably would
not be known for many years to come.