An explosion in a rig on April 20, 2010 had led to massive disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. It is estimated that 4.9 million barrels oil escaped into the waters spreading the rig’s location off New Orleans to the west coast of Florida.
At that time environmentalists and biologists had expressed their fears that the oil spill would damage fish.
Their fears turned out to be right when scientists from the University of South Florida did their study. They found chemical fingerprint of spilled oil in fish livers. Lead researcher Steven Murawski, a professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science in Tampa, said: “We matched up the oil in the livers and flesh with Deepwater Horizon like a fingerprint.”
This has been confirmed by the USF study. It is understood that scientists concluded their study after surveying fish populations in the Gulf of Mexico in 2011 and 2012. What scientists’ stumbled was “the incidence of skin lesions in 2011 sampling was most frequent in some bottom-dwelling species along the continental shelf edge north of the Deep-water Horizon site.”
It would be interesting to see what steps scientists will suggest to extricate the fish from such a situation.
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