Saving Seafood

NOAA and Deepwater Horizon Trustees Report on Progress Restoring the Gulf of Mexico

December 1, 2021 — NOAA and the Deepwater Horizon federal and state Trustee agencies recently released the 2021 Programmatic Review (PDF, 97 pages). This is the first collective review of multiple years of work across this Natural Resource Damage Assessment restoration program. It is restoring habitats, fish, and wildlife impacted by the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The comprehensive program review includes analyses of restoration data collected through 2020.

Through the end of 2020, the Trustees received approximately $2.8 billion in settlement funding. They committed approximately $2.4 billion of those funds to the planning and implementing more than 200 projects and activities. In that time period, NOAA has led or partnered with other agencies on more than 60 of them.

The review evaluated data on funding and projects focused on resources in the seven Gulf of Mexico geographies, called restoration areas. It also covers administrative and management efforts helping achieve restoration goals collaboratively, in an efficient and effective manner, with transparency and public accountability.

In an effort to identify any needed program adjustments, the review also assessed performance of the Trustees’:

  • Governance structure
  • Financial management
  • Public engagement
  • Regulatory compliance

Read the full story from NOAA Fisheries

BP oil disaster might have hurt Bluefin tuna rebuilding, study says

October 3, 2016 — The release of 4 million barrels of oil in the 87 days following the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010 occurred just as Atlantic bluefin tuna had returned to the Gulf of Mexico to spawn, and a small but significant percentage of the adult fish and their eggs and larvae were likely exposed to the toxic oil, according to a new study announced Friday (Sept. 30).

The study led by scientists with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and Stanford University concludes that the oil cumulatively covered 3.1 million square miles where fish, eggs and larvae were present in the weeks immediately after the accident.

When combined with other stressors affecting this species of tuna — including overfishing and warming seas caused by climate change — the addition of the oil’s impact “may result in significant effects for a population that shows little evidence of rebuilding,” the study published in Nature: Scientific Reports concluded.

The study, funded by the Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the BP spill required under the federal Oil Pollution Act, made use of computer modeling based on information gathered from 16 years of electronic tagging of 66 tuna that kept track of individual fish locations, temperatures and oscillating diving patterns. The information was compared with satellite observations of the breadth of oil from the spill on the surface of the Gulf to estimate the potential impacts.

Barbara Block, a Stanford professor of marine scientists and expert on Atlantic bluefin tuna, said in a Friday interview that the tagging program took advantage of earlier tagging information that indicated many of the Gulf-spawning tuna migrate back and forth from the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. Researchers captured adult tuna in Canada and installed the tags. When the fish returned to Canada a year later, the tags dropped off and were collected, and their data was added to a long-term database on fish movements.

The information collected from the tags helped the scientists confirm their theories about the spawning habits of the huge fish, which can weigh as much as 1,000 pounds at maturity, and begin reproducing about 10 years after birth.

Read the full story at the New Orleans Times-Picayune