Deepwater Horizon Spill Hit Where Tuna Spawn

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Deepwater Horizon Spill Hit Where Tuna Spawn by Bjorn Carey-Stanford

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was one of the largest environmental disasters in history, releasing roughly 4 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

For Atlantic bluefin tuna, it occurred at the worst time of year, during peak spawning season, when eggs and larval fish that are particularly vulnerable to environmental stressors exist in mass quantity.

Now, a new study suggests the spill could have both near- and long-term negative effects.

Tuna

Although the spill encompassed a relatively small proportion of the bluefin tuna spawning grounds, which extend throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico, the cumulative oiled tuna habitat was roughly 3.1 million square miles, representing the potential for a significant impact on eggs and larval bluefin tuna.

‘Dirty blizzard’ carried Deepwater oil to the seafloor

Combined with the multiple stressors of ocean warming and fishing pressure, the spill could make it more difficult for the bluefin population to rebuild, researchers warn.

“We know that bluefin tuna face numerous threats in the Gulf of Mexico and the oil spill represents another potential impact during a critical portion of their life history,” says first author Elliott Hazen of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California.

For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, scientists directly mapped the preferred spawning habitat of the Atlantic bluefin tuna by drawing from a 16-year data set of electronic tagging data from 66 fish, which provided information such as the animals’ locations, temperatures, and unique diving patterns after up to a year of being tracked on sojourns of thousands of miles. They then overlaid this data with satellite observations of the oil spill’s reach, to map the potential impact.

Deepwater Horizon Spill Hit Where Tuna Spawn

Deepwater Horizon Spill Tuna Spawn

Progression of predicted tuna spawning habitat and oil extent in the Gulf of Mexico from April to July of 2010. Quality of spawning habitat varies from low to high (white to green). (Courtesy: Hazen et al.)

“It took us many years to establish and perfect the techniques of putting a satellite tag, essentially a small computer, on giant bluefin tuna, many over 1,000 pounds in this study, and figure out exactly where and when they potentially spawn in the Gulf of Mexico,” says study coauthor Barbara A. Block, professor of marine sciences at Stanford University, who led the effort.

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They found the timing of the oil spill directly overlapped with the maximum extent of adult bluefin tuna foraging and spawning habitat in the Gulf of Mexico. At its peak in May 2010, the spill covered more than 5 percent of the spawning habitat of Atlantic bluefin tuna in the US Exclusive Economic Zone.

Exposure to oil has previously been shown to have physiological consequences to the heart, and can cause deformations and death in eggs and larval fish, making it crucial to understand the effects in order to assess the impacts of oil spills. The effect of oil on spawning adult fish is not as well understood but the crude oil may add stressors to all life history stages occurring in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The bluefin tuna population in the Gulf of Mexico has been struggling to rebuild to healthy levels for over 30 years,” Block says. “These fish are a genetically unique population, and thus stressors such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, even if minor, may have population-level effects. It is difficult to measure recruitment from the Gulf of Mexico post-2010, as the fish take a long time to enter into the commercial fishery where monitoring occurs, so we remain concerned.”

The results are only inferring that the Deepwater Horizon spill likely harmed a sliver of the spawning habitats, and thus at least some of the 2010 class of bluefin tuna, but further monitoring is needed to understand how that affects the population at large.

“Because of their economic and ecological importance, we need to ensure the conservation and protection of Atlantic bluefin tuna on their spawning grounds,” Hazen says. “We need to ensure maintained—if not increased—monitoring of Atlantic bluefin tuna in the years to come.”

Other researchers from Stanford and from Acadia University and NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center are coauthors of the study.

Source: Stanford University

Original Study DOI: 10.1038/srep33824

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