Scientists Study Gulf Oil Spill Impact on Marine Life

University of Florida’s Neil Hammerschlag is studying whether sharks along the Gulf Coast of Florida can sense oil and move away from it.

Hurley the hammerhead shark disappeared from satellite tracking two days after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as researchers were studying migration patterns of these misunderstood fish.

Now when the sharks for this study are caught and tagged, a tissue and blood sample is also taken and tested for hydrocarbons to see if they are absorbing any oil from the ongoing BP oil disaster.

There is likely to be enough work keeping researchers busy studying the effects of oil on sharks for decades.

A marine biologist from the National Aquarium in Baltimore is heading to Florida to study the potential impact of the BP oil spill near Sarasota.

National Aquarium’s Erik Rifkin wants to study the ecological disaster that the BP oil spill caused. He’s joined forces with scientists from Johns Hopkins and the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida.

The team will be deploying 100 devices to detect water pollution near Sarasota, Florida, an area that has not been affected by the oil spill yet. He says positioning the collectors there will help establish a baseline before the oil reaches that area. That way they can measure the impact if and when the oil does flow that way.

Even NASA is getting in on the animal cleanup action. Besides providing satellite images to help contain surface oil as it nears barrier islands near Louisiana, the first sea turtle hatchlings whose eggs were evacuated from the Gulf Coast oil spill to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center have been released into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Virginia Aquarium has been sending its staff down to New Orleans to help clean oil off stranded sea turtles. The aquarium’s stranding team is getting a first-hand look at the effects of oil on the keystone species of sea turtles.

For now members of the team are going to the turtles but soon the turtles may go to the Virginia Aquarium for rehabilitation.

“We expect to be dealing with the after effects of this for well over a year.” — Mark Swingle, Virginia Aquarium director of research and conservation

But it’s not just scientists and citizen scientists who are concerned about the effects of oil on marine life.

Even Federal Express is helping out.

The shipping company will work with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to ship up to 70,000 loggerhead sea turtle eggs from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic coast this summer, in an effort to move the eggs to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.