Oil Eating Animals

“The gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil,” said Roger Sassen, a specialist on the cold seeps who recently retired from Texas A&M University. “It’s preadapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.”

Credit: Derk Bergquists, the New York Times

At this point we’ve all seen the oil soaked pelicans, the dead fish, and the devastated coastal marshes but, as is it possible that, one-man’s ecological disaster is another man’s boon, or tube-worm’s boon we should say? It turns out that there is quite a large community of deep sea creatures that grow and thrive specifically on petrochemicals released from the sea floor.  Which we were even more shocked to learn happens all the time — literally all of the time.

Credit: Minerals Management Service and NOAA Chemo III Project

As the New York Times reports (William Broad, June 21 2010), these communities are populated by “clams, mussels and big tube worms — a cornucopia of abyssal life built on microbes that thrived in hot, mineral-rich waters welling up from volcanic cracks, feeding on the chemicals that leached into the seawater and serving as the basis for whole chains of life that got along just fine without sunlight.”

Now the question is how will these deep sea communities react to the BP oil spill? Opinions from the scientific community vary:

“There’s lots of uncertainty,” said Charles R. Fisher, a professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, who is leading a federal study of the dark habitats and who observed the nearby community. “Our best hope is that the impact is neutral or a minor problem.”

A few scientists say the gushing oil — despite its clear harm to pelicans, turtles and other forms of coastal life — might ultimately represent a subtle boon to the creatures of the cold seeps and even to the wider food chain.

“The gulf is such a great fishery because it’s fed organic matter from oil,” said Roger Sassen, a specialist on the cold seeps who recently retired from Texas A&M University. “It’s preadapted to crude oil. The image of this spill being a complete disaster is not true.” His stance seems to be a minority view.

Credit: Minerals Management Service and NOAA Chemo III Project

We here at Animal Architecture are certainly not in a position to make a definitive claim one way or the other but we were shocked to learn how much oil actually is seeping from the sea floor at any given point, thus, it may be possible the some members of the little seen ecosystem might find extra oil beneficial. From a separate New York Times article by William Broad of June 22nd:

In 2003, the National Research Council released a comprehensive study, “Oil in the Sea III: Inputs, Fates and Effects.” The 265-page report paints a global portrait of the petrochemical flows, both natural and unnatural. It turns out that the largest contributors far and away are the natural seeps, like those across the bottom of the gulf that power the dark ecosystems.

The 2003 report lists the relative contributions to the global sea from natural seeps as well as activities associated with the extraction, transportation and consumption of crude oil. It based its global portrait on average, annual, petrochemical releases from 1990 to 1999.

Natural seeps turned out to account for 600 kilotons annually, or 47 percent of the total. Consumption — from such activities as boating, urban runoff and industrial wastes — came in second at 480 kilotons, or 38 percent of the total. In third place were releases from such transportation-related activities as leaky pipes, tanker spills and cargo-hold washings. They amounted to 160 kilotons annually, or 12 percent of the total.

In last place were releases to the sea that tend to make headlines — those associated with oil extraction, like the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20. Globally, that kind of release amounted to 38 kilotons annually, or 3 percent of the total.

Shocking — we know. But then it reminds us of so many phenomenon in daily human life. The number of fatalities caused by car accidents and smoking dramatically outweighs fatalities due to flying, terrorism or drug trade and yet…drama appears to sway policy and action far more than statistics. We’re not suggesting that the BP tragedy isn’t a  big deal. It is. We’re just trying to look at the big picture and possibly find a silver lining —  it might be with the tube worms.

Image Credit: All images Credit the New York Times

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