Saving Seafood

Coast Shrimpers Cling to Legacy Through the Industry’s Choppy Waters

May 4, 2020 — Danny Ross, an Ocean Springs shrimper, has been on a boat for as long as he could walk. He remembers driving the family vessel as a kid, having to climb onto the dashboard to see over the steering wheel. “Two spokes to the left,” his dad would direct. He remembers, back on land, getting bad grades in art class because he would only draw one thing.

“I’d draw a pretty good boat too,” he said. “Me and my brothers were always on the boat. The rigging, the pipes – that was our jungle gym. And our swimming pool? The boat would be shrimping and we’d be diving off the bow, catching ropes on the outrivers.”

Ross, 55, recently tied up his boat after a disappointing season that saw fresh water kill 56 percent of Mississippi’s shrimp. The plummeting price of shrimp has made it difficult for Ross to find crew members, and instead he’s gone to work on another captain’s boat. After following five generations of fishermen into the business, he’s worried about the direction the industry is headed in.

“All these people, they came over here as immigrants, and they built fishing boats. Now, there’s nobody left to step into my shoes,” Ross said.

Read the full story at the Pulitzer Center

The Deepwater Horizon Disaster Fueled a Gulf Science Bonanza

April 23, 2020 — After the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded a decade ago this month, killing 11 workers and spewing a massive black curtain of crude oil across the Gulf of Mexico, thousands of first responders and cleanup workers arrived on the scene. So too did an army of scientists. Aboard seagoing research vessels and wading along beaches and marshes, they came to assess the catastrophe and track it over time. British Petroleum, owner of the rig, agreed to fund a scientific stimulus package of $500 million just a few weeks after the April 20, 2010, blowout.

The 134 million gallons of oil devastated wildlife from Texas to Florida, killing thousands of marine mammals, such as dolphins and sea turtles, according to federal officials, and destroying shoreline and underwater habitats for commercially important fish, crabs, shrimp, and oysters. More than 25,000 fishermen and seafood industry workers were suddenly out of work, with a 10-year price tag of $4.5 billion in total economic losses, according to a 2019 study by a trio of researchers funded in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Read the full story at Wired

10 years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, oil pollution found in thousands of fish, study says

April 21, 2020 — Oil pollution has been detected in thousands of fish in the Gulf of Mexico, including higher levels in popular seafood choices like yellowfin tuna, tilefish and red drum, according to a new study.

The research was carried out between 2011 and 2018, sampling more than 2,500 individual fish that belonged to 91 species living in 359 different locations in the Gulf. All of them contained oil exposure.

When the Deepwater Horizon explosion occurred 10 years ago, millions of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico’s waters over 87 days. The BP oil spill became the largest accidental oil spill in US history.

After the explosion, researchers, like those at the University of South Florida, raced to study the spill and its environmental effects in real time.

Weeks later, BP made a 10-year, $500 million commitment to fund research. While the funding comes to a close this year, research done over the last 10 years is being released.

Read the full story at CNN

Sparkling waters hide some lasting harm from 2010 oil spill

April 20, 2020 — Ten years after a well blew wild under a BP platform in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men and touching off the nation’s worst offshore oil spill, gulf waters sparkle in the sunlight, its fish are safe to eat, and thick, black oil no longer visibly stains the beaches and estuaries. Brown pelicans, a symbol of the spill’s ecological damage because so many dived after fish and came up coated with oil, are doing well.

But scientists who spent the decade studying the Deepwater Horizon spill still worry about its effects on dolphins, whales, sea turtles, small fish vital to the food chain, and ancient corals in the cold, dark depths.

The gulf’s ecosystem is so complex and interconnected that it’s impossible to take any single part as a measure of its overall health, said Rita Colwell, who has led the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Post

Coastal fish populations didn’t crash after the Deepwater Horizon spill – why not?

April 16, 2020 — When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill released 4 to 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, some early projections estimated that the toll on fisheries could reach US$5-10 billion by 2020. Chemicals in crude oil may affect fish and other marine creatures directly, through their toxicity, or indirectly by harming their food or habitat, and the effects can be immediate or long-term.

I began conducting marine science research in the northern Gulf of Mexico in 2006, and was immediately taken by the diversity of fishes, water bodies, habitats and economic sectors along the coast. This region is still home to my favorite saltwater environments – places like the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana, and Florida’s St. Joseph Bay.

From 2006-2009, I worked with teams studying the ecology of fishes that inhabit the tidal salt marshes and underwater seagrass meadows of the northern Gulf. As the Deepwater Horizon spill unfolded, I shared many other people’s deep concerns about the terrible human toll, and the ecological and economic damage to places like the sensitive shores where I had worked.

Ten years later, though, there’s some welcome good news. In our research, my colleagues and I have found that the Deepwater Horizon spill did not appear to cause significant oiling injury to coastal fish populations.

Read the full story at The Conversation

USF researchers sampled more than 2,000 fish in the Gulf of Mexico. They found oil pollution in every one.

April 16, 2020 — In the decade since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, researchers from the University of South Florida have circled the Gulf of Mexico, catching fish and cutting them open in search of toxic pollution.

They found that the gulf is a “greasy place,” said Steve Murawski, a USF fisheries biologist. All of the 2,503 fish they studied showed traces of oil exposure, not to the level of being unsafe to eat but enough to raise questions about species’ long-term health, according to the study just published in Nature Scientific Reports.

The scientists looked for evidence of toxic hydrocarbons — compounds found in crude oil — and did not connect their results to the disaster specifically. Oil leaks into the gulf for many reasons, from natural seeps to river runoff and boating discharges. That makes it nearly impossible to track pollution in fish to a specific cause. But some findings suggest the spill had an effect, Murawski said.

Read the full story at the Tampa Bay Times

Wildlife group: Gulf oil spill still affecting wildlife

April 8, 2020 — A decade after the nation’s worst offshore oil spill, dolphins, turtles and other wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico are still seriously at risk, according to a report released Tuesday.

The fact that the Gulf hasn’t fully recovered is “hardly surprising given the enormity of the disaster,” said David Muth, director of the Gulf of Mexico Restoration Program for the National Wildlife Federation, which authored the report.

The April 20, 2010, explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers and spewed what the nonprofit environmental organization Ocean Conservancy estimated to be 210 million gallons (795 million liters) of oil before it was capped 87 days later.

What followed, Muth said, was the largest restoration attempt ever in the world, with billions invested or committed to projects to help restore the Gulf and its ecosystem, and another $12 billion to be spent through the year 2032.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

How to maximize coastal ecosystem recovery 10 years after BP spill: report

March 12, 2020 — As the 10th anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill approaches, state and federal agencies should consider nine strategies aimed at advancing ecosystem restoration, maximizing use of fine and settlement money stemming from the spill, and ensuring that local communities are involved in decisions affecting their future, according to a report released by a coalition of environmental groups Wednesday.

The report, “A Decade After Disaster,” was developed by the Restore the Mississippi River Delta coalition, which was created in 2008 to support coastal restoration efforts in Louisiana. It includes the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Audubon Society, and two Louisiana-based groups, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.

While the BP spill was an unprecedented catastrophe, it provided an equally unprecedented opportunity to Louisiana and other coastal states in the form of more than $16 billion in settlement money for coastal restoration efforts, said Steve Cochran, campaign director for the Restore the Mississippi River Delta coalition and a vice president with the Environmental Defense Fund.

“Louisiana has made significant progress since the Gulf oil disaster, and we can honor these losses by continuing to act with urgency on ongoing recovery and in the face of land loss and climate change,” Cochran said.

Read the full story at NOLA.com

‘Invisible oil’ from 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill reached Florida Keys

February 18, 2020 —  Florida Keys residents may not have seen massive tar balls and fish kills after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but small concentrations of toxic crude were still reaching the islands and potentially harming marine life, as the extent of the deadly disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was worse than originally thought, according to a University of Miami study.

Nearly a decade after the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history killed 11 people and dumped 200 million gallons of crude into the ocean, researchers found discrepancies in the satellite footprint that was used to establish fisheries closures and data from sampling and field tests. They concluded that the real extent of the BP oil spill may have been 30 percent larger than originally estimated. After methane seeped into the rig and triggered an explosion on April 20, 2010, oil gushed from a pipe more than 4,000 feet below the ocean’s surface for 87 days.

Looking at water and sediment measurements, oil transport models and satellite imagery, the team of researchers concluded that what appeared on the two-dimensional images provided by the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service – areas that were determined to be contaminated and closed off to fishing – didn’t match what in-site data was showing.

Oil was flowing beyond the rig’s location off the coast of Louisiana toward the west, reaching the Texas shores, and to the other side toward the West Florida Shelf, the study said. It was also present in the Loop Current that carries water from the Gulf around the southern tip of Florida through the Keys and up toward Miami.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

The toxic reach of Deepwater Horizon’s oil spill was much larger — and deadlier — than previous estimates, a new study says

February 13, 2020 — The spread of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was far worse than previously believed, new research has found.

As the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history approaches its 10th anniversary in April, a study by two University of Miami researchers shows that a significant amount of oil and its toxic footprint moved beyond fishery closures where it was thought to be contained and escaped detection by satellites as it flowed near the Texas shore, west Florida shore and within a loop current that carries Gulf water around Florida’s southern tip up toward Miami.

In their study, published Wednesday in Science, the researchers dubbed it “invisible oil,” concentrated below the water’s surface and toxic enough to destroy 50 percent of the marine life it encountered. Current estimates show the 210 million gallons of oil released by the damaged BP Deepwater Horizon Macondo well spread out over the equivalent of 92,500 miles.

Read the full story at The Washington Post