SAN ANTONIO -- A San Antonio scientist is using her knowledge of microorganisms to assess the impact from last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster.
Recovery is ongoing in the Gulf. But one University of Texas at San Antonio professor says a tiny worm is helping scientists gauge how nature is making a comeback.
April 20, 2010. Almost five million barrels of oil spill into the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, sparking fears of a years-long ecological disaster.
Tiny worms are helping tell the story of how nature is bouncing back. Nematodes are microscopic roundworms that live in the sediment in the Gulf.
In the marine biology lab at UTSA, Dr. Jyotsna Sharma-Srinivasan examines nematodes from the Gulf of Mexico. She calls them an important bio-indicator of what’s going on after a disaster.
“They cannot move away,” she explained. “The fish, the turtles, they swim away. These guys, they just stay there. So they are, in turn, essentially like the miner's canary, the sentinels of the environment.”
Samples of nematodes taken before the oil reached the sediment showed 100 species. While samples taken three months after the spill showed fewer species, the nematodes left behind were healthy and had plenty of other microbes to eat, helping them keep their crucial niche in the food chain.
The initial findings are encouraging. “It’s good news,” Sharma-Srinivasan said. “Essentially, the fauna recovers. Ecosystems are quite flexible. They are resilient. In the long term, ecosystems do bounce back.”
The tiny worms are important because they eat bacteria and decaying matter and serve as food for bigger ocean dwellers. They are also serving as one way to gauge the success of a massive cleanup effort.
