“Even though this is a BRITISH Petroleum spill, it’s AMERICA’S Ocean”

The post Nicholas Cage is making a movie about the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Check out this stunningly, beautiful recap of where we are now and the questions still remaining. This video, featured by onEarth Magazine, was concocted by the one and only Perrin Ireland (@experrinment). Having seen Perrin create exquisite works of science art live, I speak from experience when I say she is nothing short of spectacular.

The post Day 1,825 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Just near 6 million liters of oil spilled out of Macondo well in 2010, about 6 supertankers worth of oil. The ramifications of the oil spill are still being documented and far reaching but included aberrant protein expression in fish gills, altered bacterial communities, and a whole suite nastiness in dolphins. At three different sites deep-sea corals appear to be impacted (study 1, study 2). Corals were covered with brown flocculent material and showed telltale signs of stress including excess mucus, enlargement of the skeletal elements (sclerites), and tissue loss. But new work suggests that it was not the oil that leads to unhealthy and dying corals rather dispersant.

Nearly 7 million liters of oil dispersants were applied during the cleanup efforts, 3 million of these in the deep sea directly near the wellhead. Yet little is known how oil and the dispersant, and the mixture of the two, impacts deep-sea corals. New work by Danielle DeLeo and colleagues sets out to address this in three different coral species. The group collected individual corals from the deep Gulf of Mexico using remote operated vehicles. On board corals were exposed to crude oil (collected from Macondo during the spill, dispersant (Corexit 9500A), a mixture of the two, and a seawater control.

All three deep-sea coral species examined showed more severe declines in health in response to dispersant alone and the oil-dispersant mixtures than the oil-only treatments. To restate, the dispersant was more toxic than the oil. Dispersants are known to disrupt the normal function of cell and organelle membranes. This means molecules are not transported normally across the membranes and cells cannot osmoregulate. Dispersant mixed with oil increases polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that organisms break down into toxic forms. Basically, the dispersant, as designed, increased the proportion of crude oil compounds that were biologically available.

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The post Given the choice, corals would prefer oil to dispersant first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For those of you without an iron stomach, hang out in the #DSNSuite more often or, a more palatable version:

The Dirty Martini

2 oz gin

1 tbsp dry vermouth

2 tbsp olive juice

2 olives (and an extra bowl on the side so I can put them on my fingers and eat them…cause I’m cool like that)

How to Dirty your Martini:

1. Place an ice cube and a small amount of water in a cocktail glass. Place in freezer for 2 – 3 minutes. 

2. Fill a mixer with all ingredients including garnish. Cover and shake hard 3 – 4 times. 

3. Remove cocktail glass from freezer, and empty. Strain contents of the mixer into the cocktail glass, include one of the olives, and serve with a mysterious smile.

The post The Dirtiest of Martinis first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The authors used chemical analysis to look for signatures of DWH oil, while simultaneously counting and identifying species of meiofauna (microscopic animals such as nematode worms, copepod crustaceans, etc.) and macrofauna (slightly larger, but still small animals such as polychaete worms). In this way, the presence of oil compounds could be compared with the number of deep-sea species present and the abundance of different organisms.

Aaaand, there’s no questioning these results. Here’s a map of sample sites, where color indicates impact (red = highest impact, with a high chemical signature of oil, low species diversity, and high nematode:copepod ratios, which is a biological indicator of oil pollution):

Now we zoom in and focus on the area surrounding the wellhead:

Since you can’t sample everywhere in the deep-sea, the authors also used their dataset to model the predicted benthic footprint over a wider area. Remember, red is bad:

And again, zooming into the area directly around the wellhead. Shazaam:

In addition to confirming the impact around the wellhead, this modeling approach picks up on shallow water impacts (orange patches off Louisiana, likely driven by surface transport of oil slicks), as well as a predicted area of moderate impact extending 17km to the southwest of the wellhead (remember that deepwater oil plume? Yeah, it seems to have affected animals living in the mud below it).

Note that the red “severely impacted” deep-sea area is 24.4 square kilometers, and the moderately impacted yellow area is 148 sq km (in total, that’s more than TWO Manhattans impacted by oil. Imagine New York City covered in sticky crude twice over…).

When you think about the size of the deep-sea impact, the road to recovery also seems quite grim. We’re talking possibly decades to return to business as normal:

Full recovery at impacted stations will require degradation or burial of DWH-derived contaminants in combination with naturally slow successional processes….Recovery of soft-bottom benthos after previous shallow-water oil spills has been documented to take years to decades [39,40]. In the deep-sea, temperature is uniformly around 4°C, and TOC [total organic carbon] and nutrient concentrations are low, so it is likely that [oil] hydrocarbons in sediments will degrade more slowly than in the water column or at the surface. Also, metabolic rates of benthos in the deep-sea are very slow and turnover times are very long [41,42]. Given deep- sea conditions, it is possible that recovery of deep-sea soft-bottom habitat and the associated communities in the vicinity of the DWH blowout will take decades or longer.

Reference:

Montagna PA, Baguley JG, Cooksey C, Hartwell I, Hyde LJ, Hyland JL, et al. (2013) Deep-Sea Benthic Footprint of the Deepwater Horizon Blowout. PLoS ONE, 8(8):e70540.

The post The Deep-sea footprint of Deepwater Horizon first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In September an oil sheen about four miles long had appeared in the Gulf of Mexico near the Deep Water Horizon well site.  The sheen was originally spotted on a satellite image from BP.  That oil from the sheen matches the oil from Deep Water Horizon site.

On December 15, remotely operated vehicles were sent to the Deepwater Horizon wreckage and the surrounding area.

“No apparent source of the surface sheen has been discovered by this effort,” said Capt. Duke Walker, Federal On-Scene Coordinator for Deepwater Horizon. “Next steps are being considered as we await the lab results of the surface and subsurface samples and more detailed analysis of the video shot during the mission.”

But of unfortunately, “The sheen is not feasible to recover” said Walker, but “does not pose a risk to the shoreline” Shoreline? What about the open ocean ecosystem?

Video of the ROV inspections can be found at the following links:

Well Heads

http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=1861633

Wreckage

http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=1861630

Riser Pipe

http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=1861396

Containment Dome

http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=1861393

The post Mystery Sheen Near Deep Water Horizon Site first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In the face of a brutal insult, one often turns to wry humor as a coping mechanism. I found myself doing this last weekend as I walked along a wetland on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, offended by the landscape around me:

“Now these birds are tarred. And feathered.”

“You can fry crab legs in butter. Or oil.”

“Here comes the creature from the black lagoon!”

And when I happened upon a pair of abandoned flip-flops, one suffering from catastrophic damage, it was all too easy to joke about blowout preventers.

I was walking along the bank of a shallow bay in the neighborhood of Sint Willibrordus, not far from where stayed when I was a Ph.D. student studying corals. Sitting just inshore from the beautiful corals of Rif Sint-Marie, this saliña is home to a large population of flamingos and lined with beautiful mangrove trees. It was now also ringed with tar balls, oil slicks, and strands of crude, lapping at the shore with each wave.

Just up-current from this blackened bay is the Bullenbaai Oil Terminal, where oil is transferred between large trans-oceanic tankers and smaller ships that can navigate the shallow ports of Venezuela and the Gulf of Mexico. At this facility—which is owned by Curacao’s Isla Refinery—oil had been spilled from a storage tank on land straight into the blue Caribbean waters below. Thanks to tropical storm Isaac, the normally-offshore winds had reversed direction, delivering this crude insult onshore and into the saliña.

An oil spill in the news is an abstract thing. Though I had seen photos from the Exxon Valdez spill and video from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, I hadn’t prepared to be so deeply insulted by an oil spill in person. Crude oil is the blackest black there is. In a shallow bay in the hot Caribbean sun, it had formed greasy pavements and tar balls almost impossibly goey. It shellacked anything it touched – animal, mineral, or vegetable. I watched a painted-black crab stumble across the ground. Tar balls bobbed between paved-black rocks and the dense underwater branches of mangrove trees, where juvenile fish usually hide from predators. The mangroves’ thin root-like breathing structures poked up above the water surface, slimed with crude and certainly clogged. The arboreal version of black lung. A flock of five flamingos took flight, with black patches on wings where they didn’t belong.

To add injury to crude insult, whatever fraction of hydrocarbons that hadn’t found its fate in the form of tar balls or tree-suffocation-slurry was evaporating from the saliña, delivering a headache and nausea on top of my tropical depression. When these chemicals are mixed by waves into the nearby coral reef, the most sensitive corals will die. Others will grow more slowly for years.

As the animals starve and suffocate, as the mangrove trees wither, Curaçao as an island suffers as well, losing million of dollars in natural resource value. When healthy, the saliña at Rif Sint-Marie is a nursery for juvenile fish, a foraging site for flamingos, habitat for shore birds, a sanctuary for native plants, a tourist attraction, a recreational area, a natural treasure. Yet the total fine for spilling oil in Curaçao, if it comes from land, is 5,000 Netherlands Antilles guilders or about $2,800 U.S. dollars. The amount of oil spilled doesn’t change the fine.

Just days before the spill, the Curaçaoan government proposed that the saliña at Rif Sint-Marie along with three other sites be protected through the Ramsar Convention – an international treaty to identify and conserve wetlands of international importance. Central to the Ramsar agreement is the commitment to “wise use” of wetlands and the preservation of their ecological character.

I could scoff at this as a sad irony, symbolic of the balance of powers when humans and nature wrestle for survival. But I’m less of a pessimist with the crude jokes out of my system. The people of Curaçao responded to this oil spill with cutting questions, focused attention, and hundreds of hours of volunteer work. Together with the Ramsar proposal, it’s a sign that the island as a whole is waking up to the true nature of the treasure it owns. It’s not black gold, the giant refinery in the middle of the island, or a terminal to transfer petroleum from one tanker to another. It’s the coral reefs, the mangroves, the birds, the undeveloped lands, and the millions of dollars they’re worth when kept safe from our insults.

The post Guest Post: Crude oil insults in the Caribbean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Past studies investigating effects of oil spills on salt marshes indicate that negative impacts on plants can be overcome by vegetation regrowth into disturbed areas once the oil has been degraded (8, 28–30). This finding suggests that marshes are intrinsically resilient to (i.e., able to recover from) oil-induced perturbation, especially in warmer climates such as the Gulf of Mexico, where oil degradation and plant growth rates may be high. (Silliman et al. 2012)

The finding’s aren’t surprising. Oil killed stuff. But even after 2 years, there’s been more speculation than published research and I think its important to highlight ongoing efforts to characterize the exact ways in which oil wreaked havoc on the Gulf ecosystem.

These data provide evidence of salt-marsh community die-off in the near-shore portion of the Louisiana shoreline after the BP-DWH oil spill because of high concentrations of oil at the edge of the marsh. Specifically, these findings suggest that the veg- etation at the marsh edge, by reaching above the highest high- tide line in the microtidal environment of the Gulf of Mexico, blocked and confined incoming oil to the shoreline region of the marsh. This shoreline containment of the oil may have protected inland marsh but led to extensive mortality of marsh plants lo- cated from the marsh edge to 5–10 m inland and to sublethal plant impacts on plants 10–20 m from the shoreline, where plant oiling was less severe….These data also suggest that the mechanism of the lethal effects of oil are more likely derived from interference with respiration and photosynthesis than from direct toxicity because plant death only occurred at high levels of oil coverage. (Silliman et al. 2012)

Silliman et al. found that this oil-induced plan death effectively speed up the rate of erosion in Louisiana marsh ecosystems. Oiled sites eroded twice as fast as reference (non-oiled) sites, for a full year (October 2010-October 2011) before leveling back off again.

Our results suggest that there are reasons for both optimism and concern about the impact of this oil spill on Mississippi deltaic marshes of Louisiana. On one hand, our results reveal that marsh vegetation displays remarkable resilience to oil spills by concentrating and confining the effects of oil to the marsh edge, recovering fully in noneroded areas after ∼1.5 y, and suppressing, through this recolonization, further accelerated erosion rates along the shoreline. The lack of oil on the marsh surface or on grasses at distances greater than 15 m from the shoreline at any site (Fig. 1A) suggests that incoming oil sheens were contained and prevented from moving into interior marshes by a baffling wall of live and dying salt-marsh grasses, a process that in itself increases the resistance of the extensive marsh ecosystem to oil spill. However, this resistance comes at a high cost for the impacted areas because marsh grass die-off and subsequent sediment exposure to waves resulted in a more than doubling of the rate of erosion of the intertidal platform, leading to permanent marsh ecosystem loss. (Silliman et al. 2012)

Louisiana’s salt marshes play a critical ecological roles, acting as storm buffers and breeding grounds that underpin the entire Gulf seafood industry. But they have been in trouble for a looooong time. The BP oil spill added extra stress to these already-stressed ecosystems–yet another anthropogenic impact promoting further ecosystem decline.

Reference

Silliman BR, van de Koppel J, McCoy MW, Diller J, Kasozi GN, Earl K, et al. Degradation and resilience in Louisiana salt marshes after the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2012 Jun. 25.

The post Gulf oil spill suffocated marsh grasses, enhanced erosion first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When all the shiz went down in the Gulf of Mexico, yours truly and collaborators had their nose to the grind, madly running around collecting samples and spending late nights in the lab listening to the hum of PCR machines. We were awarded an NSF RAPID grant in August 2010 to use parallel taxonomic and high-throughput sequencing approaches to characterize the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on microscopic eukaryote communities inhabiting marine sediments. In English: we used both DNA and old skool microscopy to compare species living on beaches before and after the oil spill. This grant funded some hardcore sampling trips (September 2010, where I went on a boat and drove 1700+ miles along the Gulf Coast in one week, and March 2011 when we returned to sample sites a year after the oil spill) and a kickass undergraduate workshop about the “Bioinformatics of Biodiversity” which may or may not have involved YouTube Karaoke sessions and a randomly acquired cowboy hat.

So today, I’m pleased to announce that the first (of hopefully many) papers from this project has officially been published in PLoS One. For our first manuscript, we focused on a set of pre- and post-spill samples collected around Dapuhin Island, Alabama in May and September 2010, respectively. Our pre-spill samples represented our baseline, collected by our collaborator Ken Halanych at Auburn University days after the oil started gushing (his team quickly drove down to the coast before any of it had come close to the shore). Post-spill samples were collected 4 months later, after sheets of sticky crude were pitched ashore during a summertime of heavy beach oiling and BP’s cleanup efforts doggedly wiped away the blackness. We also included another post-spill sample site from Grand Isle, Louisiana, where I suspected that the the state of the beach would produce some intriguing data.

Before I describe our results, I’ll show you what the beaches looked like at the time of post-spill sampling. In September 2010, Dauphin Island was pretty serene: quiet, yes, because tourists were eschewing the region, but the shoreline itself showed little evidence of the BP fiasco. If you looked closely (which I certainly did), you could find little splotches of oil, an isolated tarball, or a buried “dirty” layer of sand. But if you had spent the past year on a media blackout, never heard of Deepwater Horizon, you would think that the Alabama coast looked pretty ordinary.

Grand Isle was a scene from another planet. A far cry from the parallel, reestablished tranquility on other Gulf shores. Grand Isle was a beach that was clearly impacted at the time of sampling. In fact, I specifically made a 6-hour detour to this site after hearing local news reports lamenting those tarnished Louisiana shores. Upon my arrival, I found the beach to be so impacted that I was hardly allowed near the sea. The ranger on duty turned me away at the local park. Fluorescent orange mesh blocked my attempts to cross the dunes. When I finally found a gap that led me to water, I made haste for fear of being chased away. There was heavy machinery humming up and down the shore (the park ranger noted that beach access was restricted for safety concerns), and piles of oiled sand awaiting a mechanical cleanse.

At each site we collected replicate sediment cores for DNA work (frozen immediately on dry ice) and taxonomic analysis (archived in 4% formalin, which is better for preserving morphology). The sequencing itself was a piece of cake (although the bioinformatics, not so much). I carried out standard environmental DNA protocols at the Hubbard Center for Genome Studies at the University of New Hampshire, where I was previously working as a postdoc under Kelley Thomas (senior author on our paper). First we separated the microbial eukaryote species from the sediment by suspending them in water and concentrating these organisms on a 45um sieve. Next we broke open all the cells using a beadbeather: think “Will it Blend” with ball bearings and soft tissue. Nothing stays intact. Finally, we used the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to broadly amplify two different regions of the 18S rRNA gene from the entire biological community present at each sample site. PCR amplicons were sent off for 454 sequencing, and we waited. In the meantime, Jo Sharma at UTSA was spending long hours at the microscope carrying out taxonomic identifications for nematodes at each site being sequenced.

I’ll pause for a moment here to offer more context. When I say we are studying “microbial eukaryote” species, I’m talking about puny things with a body size <1mm. You know, the ones no one cares about. And the ones I happen to be obsessed with (they’re so much more interesting than dolphins). We’re talking about taxonomic groups like meiofaunal metazoans (e.g. Nematoda, Platyhelminthes, Gastrotricha and Kinorhyncha, etc.), microbial representatives of fungi and deep protist lineages (Alveolata, Rhizaria, Amoebozoa, algal taxa in the Chlorophyta and Rhodophyta, etc.), and eggs and juvenile stages of some larger metazoan species. The reason why we chose to focus on these groups is precisely because they tend to be ignored. Most of the awesome genomic investigations only look at Bacteria and Archaea. But small eukaryotes are equally ubiquitous as their non-nucleated counterparts, and in marine ecosystems they play key roles as decomposers, predators, producers and parasites–yet we know little about their biology, ecology and diversity. By describing species changes in the Gulf of Mexico, we wanted to infer something about the potential for large-scale or long-term repercussions for Gulf ecosystems.

Sorry to keep you waiting–lets get down to the juicy stuff. Our results were pretty dramatic. After analyzing 1.2 million DNA sequences alongside nematode taxonomy, we found shockingly significant shifts in microbial communities between pre- and post-spill sites.

The first thing we saw was a stark shift in the diversity and abundance of taxa between pre- and post-spill sites. Pre-spill sites showed a typical marine community: dominated by nematodes, but containing a mishmash of other taxa such as arthropods, polychaetes, protists, algae, and fungi. Post-spill sites, in contrast, were almost exclusively dominated by a few species of fungi, with a spattering of some other metazoan species.

After looking at the charts summarizing the overall taxonomic assemblages, we moved on to ecological analyses such as Unifrac. We built a phylogenetic tree with our DNA sequences, computed some metrics about the branching topology, and got an overarching indication of how similar our samples sites were at the community level (e.g. for all species sequenced at each site).

We also did something similar with taxonomic data, using the Bray-Curtis similarity metric to analyze the list of visually-identified nematode species which were present (or not) across our sample sites.

Both our DNA and taxonomic analyses were relaying the same story: our samples clustered together according to pre- and post-spill time points: the before/after communities at the SAME site weren’t closely related to each other. Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA, Unifrac figure B, above) also underlined biodiversity distinctions across pre-spill sites. Even though pre-spill sites were characterized by nematode dominance, it wasn’t the same group of nematode species present at every site. In contrast, post-spill sites converged towards a similar community structure–these trends were likely driven by oil-associated fungal taxa that were common across post-spill sites.

You’ll also note that we observed a few outlier sites; Ryan Court (a sandy beach in front of residential property, on the Gulf coast of Dauphin Island) and Dauphin Bay (an inlet on the opposite site of the island, facing the Alabama mainland). Although we did observe community shifts in these post-spill samples, the shifts weren’t characterized by the typical fungal dominance seen at other sites. We think this has something to do with the geography and human-mediated cleanup efforts. To protect residents, Ryan Court had waterborne barriers going up and down during the heaviest oiling–this might have mitigated the worst effects in the sediment perhaps, preventing a shift to fungal dominance. Oil also might not have penetrated the inland Dauphin Bay site very well, since it was inherently sheltered by its location and some nearby marshland on Dauphin Island.

For me, the most convincing evidence of oil impacts was the data from Grand Isle. That 5-hour drive (and accompanying True Blood soundtrack) was the best sampling decision I made. Although I was pretty scared of Vampires when I was driving back through Louisiana that night. The beach was unarguably facing heavy oil impacts when I took samples. DNA analysis showed that the fungal-dominated post-spill assemblage in LA contained the same taxa as the Shellfish Lab, Dauphin Island community. Same putative species (Operational Taxonomic Units, a.k.a. OTUs), found 250 miles apart. To the casual observer, the scene at Dauphin Island didn’t look anything like Grand Isle. But thanks to the deep insight afforded by high-throughput sequencing, we were able to capture a snapshot of post-spill microbial assemblages that was highly indicative of environmental disturbance.

So we started looking closer at the data. Looking within phylogenetic tree topologies, I manually examined what taxa were most closely related to our fungal OTUs. Evolutionary relationships seemed to hint that post-spill fungi could survive using environmental hydrocarbons as an energy source:

Two distinct fungal community structures were recovered at post-spill sites: one assemblage dominated by Cladosporium OTUs (recovered at Shellfish Lab and Grand Isle), showing a close relationship to C. cladosporioides sequences in phylogenetic topologies, and a second assemblage dominated by OTUs in the fungal genus Alternaria (Belleair Blvd and Bayfront Park).  Fungal taxon dominance may be dictated by the physical marine environment; Alternaria OTUs dominated in brackish Mobile Bay, while Cladosporium was recovered in higher-salinity sediments on the outer shores of Dauphin Island.  These highly dominant post-spill OTUs appear as rare taxa in diverse pre-spill fungal assemblages, suggesting that oil-induced environmental stress may have favoured the rise of resilient, opportunistic species (able to capitalize on the large input of new resources).  Although the diversity and ecological role of marine fungi is not well understood, previous evidence suggests that observed fungal assemblages denote a signature of crude oil in Gulf sediments. Cladosporium contains ubiquitous, opportunistic species that can extensively utilize hydrocarbon compounds and thrive in hostile, polluted conditions that appear to be intolerable for other marine fungi [9,10].  Compared to many other fungi, marine Altenaria demonstrate increased activity of lignocellulose-degrading enzymes [11] that have been implicated in breakdown of industrial toxins [12,13].  In addition to these dominant OTUs, we recovered a variety of fungi at post-spill sites (including OTUs phylogenetically related to Apergillus, Acremonium, Acarospora, Rhodocollybia, and Rhizopus) that rarely comprised a significant component of pre-spill fungal communities. A number of these marine groups have also been shown to metabolize hydrocarbon compounds [14,15]. (Bik et al. 2012)

This paper has been a long time coming, and I’ve been dying to blog about it for the better part of a year. We went through the rounds and rejections at several top-tier journals before a lengthy review process at PLoS ONE, so I’m now pleased that these results are finally seeing the light of day. Our work in the Gulf of Mexico is still ongoing — unfortunately this was one study that raised a hell of a lot more questions than answers. We’ve continued to collect post-spill samples at regular intervals (including the samples I collected one-year after the original pre-spill samples). We want to figure out if the community shifts we saw in this study were really due to oil (as suggested by the dominance of oil-associated fungal taxa), mechanical beach cleanup efforts (which may have physically damaged and killed fragile microbial species), or whether they might be influenced by seasonal and temporal variation in the Gulf region (a topic where there isn’t much existing data). Another motivation is to study the longevity of these patterns–additional sampling time points will allow us to track the post-spill recovery, or lack thereof, of microbial eukaryote communities. Will assemblages begin to resemble pre-spill communities again, or will these beaches remain depauperate and/or be replenished with a different set of fauna? The post-spill fungi are cool and intriguing too. Were they thriving in oiled beach sands, or just weakly persisting after other species were killed off? Transcriptomics (studying gene expression by sequencing mRNA) will help us to answer this question and determine the species that were alive and kicking at the time of sampling. We’re also going to use random, shotgun sequencing to look deeply into the genomes of sparsely-populated, fungal-dominated beaches at sites such as Grand Isle: if post-spill species are eating hydrocarbon compounds, perhaps their genetic machinery will give an indication of the metabolic pathways that enable them to use oil as an energy source.

So really, this first paper is just a prelude. The main act will be as grand as Beethoven’s 5th.

Reference: Bik, H.M., Halanych, K.M., Sharma, J. & Thomas, W.K. (2012) Dramatic shifts in benthic microbial eukaryote communities following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, PLoS ONE http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0038550

The post Dramatic impacts on beach microbial communities following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Late last week, we reluctantly handed over more than 3,000 confidential e-mails to BP, as part of a subpoena from the oil company demanding access to them because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster lawsuit brought by the US government. We are accused of no crimes, nor are we party to the lawsuit. We are two scientists at an academic research institution who responded to requests for help from BP and government officials at a time of crisis.

Reddy and Camilli’s most impassioned argument noted that public perception of the scientific process, and thus the integrity of scientists themselves could be fundamentally questioned as BP tries to wiggle its way out of paying massive fines:

BP claimed that it needed to better understand our findings because billions of dollars in fines are potentially at stake. So we produced more than 50,000 pages of documents, raw data, reports, and algorithms used in our research — everything BP would need to analyze and confirm our findings. But BP still demanded access to our private communications. Our concern is not simply invasion of privacy, but the erosion of the scientific deliberative process.

Deliberation is an integral part of the scientific method that has existed for more than 2,000 years; e-mail is the 21st century medium by which these deliberations now often occur. During this process, researchers challenge each other and hone ideas. In reviewing our private documents, BP will probably find e-mail correspondence showing that during the course of our analysis, we hit dead-ends; that we remained skeptical and pushed one another to analyze data from various perspectives; that we discovered weaknesses in our methods (if only to find ways to make them stronger); or that we modified our course, especially when we received new information that provided additional insight and caused us to re-examine hypotheses and methods.

In these candid discussions among researchers, constructive criticism and devil’s advocacy are welcomed. Such interchange does not cast doubt on the strengths of our conclusions; rather, it constitutes the typically unvarnished, yet rigorous, deliberative process by which scientists test and refine their conclusions to reduce uncertainty and increase accuracy. To ensure the research’s quality, scientific peers conduct an independent and comprehensive review of the work before it is published.

Here at DSN we’re all very concerned. Personally, I would be abhorred at such an invasion of privacy–especially in a scenario where I offered help pro bono in the face of a disaster, like many scientists did during the BP spill.

But some parties seem less concerned. Wired news summed up the different arguments:

Reaction to these fears has been mixed. Marine biologists Kevin Zelnio and Miriam Goldstein of Deep Sea News both tweeted their concerns, with Goldstein worrying about the precedent and Zelnio wondering if BP will “treat oceanographers as dishonestly as climate denialists treated researchers.”

Science policy expert Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado was more sanguine, writing on his blogthat publicly supported scientists should expect to share their full deliberations. “Besides, good science, even when messy, does not need to be hidden from view,” wrote Pielke.

Attorney David Pettit of the Natural Resources Defense Council also said that concerns may be overblown, though he preferred to talk about the legal dynamics shaping BP’s request.

Whereas federal law has established special protections for attorney-client privileges, doctor-patient confidentiality and journalists shielding their sources, there are no protections for academic scientists. Requests like BP’s are considered on a case-by-case basis.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if an academic institution went to the Supreme Court and said we need another exemption for academic research,” Pettit said.

Regardless, we need more legal protection for researchers. Reddy and Camilli’s home institution, WHOI, issued a parallel statement laying out some of the legal concerns spurred by the email subpoenas:

This case raises issues that go far beyond our institution and BP. Despite earlier Supreme Court recognition of the importance of the deliberative scientific process, there remains inadequate legislation and legal precedent to shield researchers and institutions who are not parties to litigation from having to surrender pre-publication materials, including deliberative emails and notes, manuscript drafts, reviewers’ comments, and other private correspondence. This situation leaves scientists and institutions vulnerable to litigants who could disregard context and use the material inappropriately and inaccurately in an effort to discredit their work. In addition, there is no guarantee that the costs, both time and material, incurred by an institution in response to court-mandated requests will be reimbursed by the litigants.

The materials that BP demanded may include intellectual property, hard won by the researchers. While there are protections that can be placed by the court and through confidentiality orders, experts in the litigant parties receiving these materials may obtain insight into the creation of this intellectual property and be able to replicate it for their own programs even if they do not directly take it. It is unlikely that institutions such as WHOI would be able to identify or prosecute this infringement of intellectual property rights.

This can of worms has just been opened, so lets keep the dialogue open–lest it be forgotten like the oil still festering in the deep.

The post BP’s email subpoenas threaten to erode the scientific deliberative process first appeared on Deep Sea News.