Mar 4, 2011 10:10 GMT  ·  By
The oil spill that started in April 2010 damaged microbes and bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico
   The oil spill that started in April 2010 damaged microbes and bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico

Although a lot less exposed to the media than large animals and birds, microorganisms such as bacteria and microbes were also seriously affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year.

This discovery goes a long way towards showing the real extent of the damage the catastrophic event caused. Scientists say that the negative consequences spread a lot more than apparent at first glance.

Undoubtedly, experts believe, studies to assess the impact of the worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States will continue for years, even decades, and it will be only then that we will get a clear picture of just how much damage it caused.

The new discoveries were based on in-depth analysis of the microbial flux in the Gulf of Mexico before and after the massive oil spill. At this point, the results are still preliminary, but things are looking bad.

There is still no way of knowing precisely how much these fluctuations in the microbial flux will last. If they span an extensive time frame, then they may cause habitat-wide changes as well.

Bacteria and microbes are at the very basis of the food chain, and so any change they suffer may reflect onwards through food webs, and into other, larger species, Wired reports.

“While visible damages are evident in the wildlife populations and marine estuaries, the most significant effect may be on the most basic level of the ecosystems: the bacterial and plankton populations,” experts behind the study wrote in a scientific paper.

The work is published in the February 28 issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nature Precedings.

“Abrupt and severe changes in the microbial metabolism can produce long-term effects on the entire ecosystem,” add the investigators, who were lead by University of Houston biologist William Widger.

He and his group sequenced genetic material retrieved from water samples collected at numerous locations. These included near-shore water and beach-soil samples from Mississippi and Louisiana.

“Microbial communities are an essential but vulnerable part of any ecosystem. The basic metabolic activities of microbial communities represent the fundamental status of any environment,” the team argues in the new paper.

One alarming finding was that concentrations of the microorganism Vibrio cholera, which is responsible for causing cholera, spiked up following last April's oil spill. Populations of common photosynthesizing microbes such as Synechococcus were also found to be in collapse.

“One viewpoint, which is what BP would want us to believe, is that this oil and gas had been naturally dispersed and had a relatively minor effect, and perhaps no long-term impact on the health of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem,” says expert Ian MacDonald.

“The other point of view is that it killed lots of animals, oiled wetlands and may have long-term ecological impacts, but it’s too early to assess that,” adds the expert, who is an oceanographer at the Florida State University.

“We all hope the first one is correct, but we should try to be very objective about determining what really did happen,” he concludes.