Marine life dramatically declined after BP oil spill

A new study is out shedding light on the aftermath from the 2010 BP oil spill. 134 million gallons of oil dumped in a crucial part of the Gulf. Now, researchers say marine animals in some areas have plummeted by 60% since the spill. They're seeing severe declines among fish, crustaceans, and squid, with populations showing no sign of recovery. Oh, my goodness. This is not what we wanted to hear. Researchers from across the country have been studying the impacts, which includes USF biology professor Dr. Heather Judkins joining us this morning Dr. Judkins, how are you good good morning you know back in 2010 you know i was here and you could see with our camera all of the oil just spilling out and i knew it was only going to be a matter of time before we realized the full impact of this and you and some of your colleagues have spent almost a decade studying this. So tell me some of the results. Yeah, we had started work right after the spill occurred. So Dr. Tracy Sutton at Nova Southeastern University put together a team of us to take a look at the midwater column. So our focus was from zero down to about 3,500 feet down. We never got near the seafloor, so just the midwater. And we have had a series of different trawls that we've done over many years at this point and we found that there was a large decline in abundance of all of our animal groups i study squid and octopus so all of our groups had declined since the 2011 series of net stuff that we started you know i know when you talk about the small squid and the krill and the shrimp and stuff like that you're talking about folks um folks marine life that's kind of on the bottom of the food chain so did you do any studies on some of the larger fish and how it impacted them because obviously they're losing some of their food right that's the one of the big important pieces right we our group of stuff are called micronekton so they're the smaller fish these midwater animals and they are important for the larger predators like tuna and sharks and marine mammals and birds so we didn't directly study the apex predators, we were studying the food source. And we do know from other studies that have occurred in the Gulf that, for example, sperm whales are not in the same area that they used to be around the area where we studied. There are changes and differences where some of the bigger animals are found now. And we believe it could be because there's just less prey. There's less of our stuff there for them to be eating. So when you studied, I mean, did you study the whole gulf or just the particular area where the spill was our initial studies in 2011 covered a broad swath of the north gulf of mexico um the subsequent studies since 2015 there we've been very fortunate to get uh funding from lots of different agencies and that is a smaller square so that is around the oil spill where it occurred and a little further out down south west and east a little bit not as big as the 2011 study. And here's the million dollar question. If or when do you think this will recover? Is it something that's going to take decades? Is it something that could take a few years or is it never going to recover? That's a great question. We're not entirely sure at this point. I am personally not surprised that it has not recovered yet, right? Since our data in this study went to 2023, we've gone out a few more times and we have one more cruise next year. And I can tell you anecdotally, we haven't seen it start to recover yet. Some other studies, right, the Valdez spill that occurred in 1989, they're still looking at recovery of some of those groups. And we're in the deep sea and everything just happens slower. Slower metabolism, reproductive rates are different how the animals aggregate are different so recovery could be within five to ten years or maybe we've caused a huge shift and maybe this is now the new normal so we're not sure yet you know additional studies would be great to continue this to see where it could recover well as you do those studies please let us know because i'd love to keep talking to you about this professor heather judkins uh thank you i know it's not the greatest report that you know we wanted to put forth but we knew there was going to be an incredible impact so we appreciate you joining us this morning thank you great thanks again thank you yeah hey folks i want to hear from you what kind of science questions do you have please scan the qr code let me know in-depth science questions they could be international they can be just from florida or whatever and we may feature your question in a future Davo the Science Pro segment.