Belleair Boulevard on Dauphin Island, Alabama, in September 2010HOLLY BIK
More than 2 years following the largest oil spill the Gulf of Mexico has ever seen, scientists are still discovering consequences on the surrounding ecosystems. Most recently, researchers at the University of New Hampshire’s Hubbard Center for Genome Studies (HCGS) and colleagues found that microbial communities in the marine sediments around the Gulf changed significantly as a result of the disaster, according to the study published this week (June 6) in PLoS ONE.
The researchers sampled five shore sites, near Dauphin Island, Alabama, and Grand Isle, Louisiana, at two time points—just after the spill began (before oil had reached the beaches) and again in September 2010. “In that short time period, we saw a drastic change in the microbial community,” lead author Holly Bik, then ...
