Mystery in the Marsh: Where are the bugs?
Bay Jimmy, La. LSU research assistant Brooke Hesson, brushing a net across some marsh grass, makes a somewhat surprising discovery. "There's a beetle in this one, a pretty beetle," Hesson said, noting that beetles are rare in this section of oiled marsh along the shores of Barataria Bay. "We started looking at insects because they're great indicators of what's happening with stressors in the environment," said Dr. Linda Hooper-Bui of the LSU Disaster Ecology Lab. Hooper-Bui studies critters at the base of the food web in areas that were heavily oiled during the BP Macondo well blowout of 2010.Researchers expected the population to be impacted by oil in the first year and then bounce back. In some areas, that has yet to happen. "I would say a couple weeks ago it was the worst I've seen out here," Hooper-Bui said. In some of those places, researchers have found only adults, indicating the insects flew into the site virtually devoid of babies. Hooper-Biu noted,"We don't see any other life stages." However, their concern is often not so much what they see as what they do not hear. Areas of the marsh, normally teeming with life, have fallen silent. "The flitting of the wings, of the dragonflies, you just don't have that here," said Hoope-Bui. The evidence for what is wrong points to a pair of suspects: naphthalene and methylnaphthalene, two of the tens of thousands of compounds found in crude oil. "It's a good explanation because naphthalene is an insecticide and it's volatile and it's very toxic," said Hooper-Bui, noting that the evidence is not conclusive. What puzzles them more are the concentrations of the compounds, which are rising three years after the spill. Researchers theorize that, as oil breaks down in the marsh, the compounds get released. With temperatures heating up, Hooper-Bui expects oil baking in the sun to crack, releasing more toxins and, perhaps, claiming more of the spill's smaller victims.
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The long term affects of this toxic release will impact the area for decades. The ecosystem of Prince William Sound has yet to recover completely and is "living" proof.
A lesson about oil spills. Some see recovery to a degree with largerspecies, but the eco system starts bottom up. They don't call it the food chain for nothing.
Exactly, and as One Miscreant says above, the long term affects are yet to be seen. I don't want this to be forgotten as we go on to the next catastrophe; this one could have been avoided, and we can avoid future catastrophes of this kind if we stop our destructive dependence on oil andprohibitdrilling in environmentally sensitive areas.
Was it the Macondo blowout, or something else?
The geyser was brought under control and the wellhead was repaired and capped on 1 August 2010, five days after the collision. [5] [6]
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Termitesare swarming in tosouth Louisiana as part of the Formosan...
Was this collision in the same area studied?
This stuff NEVER goes away. It takes a long time for the volatiles go away, and then the tar stuff is left. You can measure BTEX in old geologic formations years and years after the spill. (BTEX is Benzene, Toluene, Ethyl Benzene, and Xylene).
I think that about 2 million years from now, our descendants will be drilling along the sea floor, wondering what is this glop? What idiots did this?
This is in the food chain. Bugs require such tiny doses to die, but those tiny doses add up. Every time a bird eats a bug dying or exposed to this stuff, it ingests tiny doses of this awful stuff. And the plankton-- they have even a lower threshold for this junk.
Almost all of those chemicals cause nerve damage, damage to circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, endocrine, etc., systems. Many of the chemicals used, including those sprayed, ON PURPOSE, in the Corexit are known to be cancer-causing, and changesDNA... We could have easily altered the course of evolution with this junk-- and the sad thing is, we'll never know, because we won't be here.
This whole thing makes me ill, and has from day one. There is no way to describe it! ARGHH!! About all I can do is splutter-- I can't even speak calmly enough to make sense about it...
I really do hope we have descendants in 2 millions years.
I think we will. We may not be anything like we are now, but I think we will. Humans have been surprisingly adaptable to environmental changes. 2 million years really isn't anything, in geologic time.