http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/602635–kitchener-biologist-studying-effects-of-gulf-oil-spill
By Mirko Petricevic, Record staff
Galvez Kitchener native Fernando Galvez is an assistant professor in the biology department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA.
A Kitchener biologist studying the effects of last year’s sprawling oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico isn’t worried about eating fish hauled from the contaminated region.
But he’s concerned the spill could starve future generations of wildlife in the area.
“I’m not a big seafood guy,” said Fernando Galvez, assistant professor of biological sciences at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, La. “(But) I would eat the fish in Louisiana.”
Galvez, a Kitchener native and graduate of the former St. Jerome’s high school, was part of a team of scientists whose research was published online Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the journal for the National Academy of Sciences based in Washington, D.C.
While the team didn’t detect abnormally high levels of toxins in the fish they studied, Galvez observed a surprising amount of biological damage to the fish.
“I was surprised by the level of change,” Galvez said in a telephone interview Friday. “Especially during the height of exposure there was massive damage on the gills – very inflamed. Also, there was a lot of damage to the intestines.”
The worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history started April 20, 2010, after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers and eventually spewing 757 million litres of oil throughout the Gulf.
The disaster caused billions of dollars in damage to hundreds of kilometres of coastline.
Galvez started taking samples in various Louisiana marshes about 10 days after the spill began, but before the oil drifted into those areas. The sampling lasted for four months.
In some regions, the surface of the water was a colourful swirling mass of crude oil.
“It looked like the surface of Jupiter,” Galvez said.
Fish collected from those areas showed “no noticeable accumulation” of toxins, he said. But there were signs of biological damage triggered by the contamination, he said.
The fish’s bodies naturally metabolized the toxins, so there was no buildup. But their bodies were damaged as a result of the biological process that metabolizes the toxins, Galvez said.
He suspects small fish, as well as other species that live in the marshes, will suffer problems reproducing and that their numbers will be depleted in the long-term.
“I think the problem is in terms of population level collapses that may have effects on fisheries because of the fact that there’s less food,” he said.
He said he expects the damage will continue long-term because oil is still soaked in sediment and it’s not breaking down. Occasionally wind and waves stir up blobs of oil and work crews continue to clean up the mess.
It’s a process that can continue to contaminate wildlife for decades, he said.
The population levels of some species of fish and birds in Alaska are still depleted two decades after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, Galvez said.
Gilbert T. Rowe, a marine ecologist at Texas A&M University at Galveston, said examining the small fish, known as killifish, was a good choice because they are so abundant. “It’s like studying a mouse” to figure out effects on humans, he said.
Bernard Rees, a fish physiologist at the University of New Orleans, said the researchers had found an important link between oil contamination and possible physiological effects. He said the most troubling possibility for the long-term health of killifish was the chance that oil contamination harmed reproduction.
But Rees said that it was too early to know the long-term effects. “Nature has the capacity to rebound, so we’ll have to wait and see if there are any long lasting population effects.”
The research team’s article is available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/recent
mpetricevic@therecord.com
Special thanks to Richard Charer