Meeting Abstract
Anthropogenic disturbances such as oil spills can present long-term challenges for affected communities. This is especially true in marine benthic environments, where the toxic components of crude oil can remain trapped in sediments for years or even decades. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon event was the largest marine oil spill in US history, sending nearly 500 million barrels of crude oil into the Northern Gulf of Mexico. We quantified benthic invertebrate communities in Ruppia beds versus unvegetated muds at oiled versus unoiled sites of the Chandeleur Islands. Shallow benthic communities are dynamic, with considerable seasonal and inter-annual variability. A priori, one might predict stochastic processes to obscure any fingerprint associated with oiling, especially many years after the event. Surprisingly, however, we find clear differences in abundance, taxonomic composition, and functional group at oiled sites. Subsurface deposit feeders appear to be more severely impacted, consistent with their intimate association with sediments. Characterizing the extent to which oiled habitats retain their functional capacity (i.e. biogeochemical cycling, productivity, advection, bioturbation, etc.) remains an important question.
