
Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume - binarymax
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67N5CC20100824?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FscienceNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Science%29&utm_content=Twitter
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mcknz
The lab that did the study is part of a team that received a $500MM award from
BP. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

<http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml>

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hga
They aren't the only ones studying this; are you aware of anything that
contradicts their results? From studies to simple observations that things
stopped getting worse when the well was capped?

(I for one an _extremely_ tired of this sort of attack, which among other
things implies that government funded researchers are a pure as the driven
snow. OK, I exaggerate, but it's been well demonstrated in _many_ fields that
deviating from the scientific establishment's orthodoxy results in your no
longer being able to get government funding for your research.)

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sz
Check this out:

[http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.html)

<http://gulfblog.uga.edu/>

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ABrandt
I believe the article you linked to discusses the same study the OP
acknowledges.

 _"These latest findings may initially seem to be at odds with a study
published last Thursday in Science by researchers from Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution..."_

 _"The Woods Hole team used an autonomous robot submarine and a mass
spectrometer to detect the plume, but were forced to leave the area in late
June...But that was before the well was capped in mid-July. Hazen said that
within two weeks of the capping, the plume could not be detected"_

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houseabsolute
Hijacking this to say that the use of the colon in this title and others like
it is deeply offensive. It should be:

"Study: Microbes Ate BP Oil Deep-Water Plume"

It doesn't make any sense for it to be the other way around!

Also, hurray that the worst case scenario didn't happen. I will try to
remember this the next time I read sky-is-falling articles from commenters at
the Oil Drum.

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jacobolus
Why do you think it doesn’t make sense? A colon doesn’t necessarily imply the
format, “person: person’s statement”, or “term: definition”, but can also be
used in titles with the form “title: subtitle” or “title: explanation”. I
think you might just be mixing up typical uses of colons in programming
language syntax with “correct” usage in English.

There’s no ultimately “right” or “wrong” (or, sheesh, “deeply offensive”)
usage of punctuation, only conventional or atypical. This particular usage is
straight-forward to understand (were you seriously confused?), and quite
common in titles and headlines of all sorts. In this case, putting “study” at
the end emphasizes the first part of the title: so what?

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houseabsolute
You wanted a period at the end of that last sentence, not a colon.

When one thing says another, for example, a study says a finding, the sayer
goes on the left. For example:

HouseAbsolute: That's just how it's done.

as in a play, or

HouseAbsolute said: that's just how it's done.

in the less often seen form of this use. That's just how it is done. I dislike
it being done the opposite way in titles because I think it probably misleads
people into thinking it's an acceptable way to use the punctuation in a
typical sentence, where in fact it is backwards from the way it should be in a
typical sentence.

> or, sheesh, “deeply offensive”

Exaggeration: something I use occasionally. (This is the appositive form of
the colon, according to Wikipedia.)

> There’s no ultimately “right” or “wrong” usage of punctuation.

I'm not a strong prescriptive punctuationist, but I do feel we should not use
misleading punctuation when we can avoid it or when it doesn't add much. A
dash would be fine here, because it's a fairly typical way of showing
quotation, although not historically accepted yet. The colon, however, is not.

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plnewman
We should turn those microbes loose on the deficit too then.

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hga
I'm afraid that condition already obtains: the microbes were up to the task
since the a lot of oil naturally seeps into the Gulf every year
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep>) and in this case they just had
a whole lot more to chow down on.

Similarly, there are entities many would rank at the moral level of microbes
that are _highly_ evolved to feast on endless quantities of Federal money,
borrowed or not. Their answer to the deficit is like the Gulf's microbes:
"more, yum!" which is not quite what I think you're looking for.

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sz
I found this article a more lucid overview of the situation:

<http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/467016a.html>

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hga
Ah, yes. that's really useful:

Like the Woods Hole study it was published in _Science_ , a notorious tool of
the industrial establishment ^_^.

The "bugs" are of the the order _Oceano­spirillales_.

One item I was able to Google said they are facultatively anaerobic
(<http://www.springerlink.com/content/v46161x20k433868/>), which would explain
how they could feast without serious oxygen depletion and that the latter is
not necessarily a good proxy for detecting oil.

This further explains how the two studies nicely mesh together (which their
PIs agree upon). Woods Hole found oil but normal oxygen levels, LBNL found
facultatively anaerobic "bugs" that were eating the oil without serious oxygen
consumption.

(We can also assume that if these bugs can be cultured and kept viable, the
basic metabolic details can be elucidated (assuming they haven't been already)
and such _in vitro_ results will further help confirm the LBNL study.)

And as it noted this is all months old data, but both studies will help guide
further searches for BP oil source oil and these bugs.

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nwatson
This might be the answer to our "depleted ocean fish stock" problem. Feed the
bottom of the food chain and we'll have plenty of fish in 5 years.

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hga
With the possible exception of damaged ocean bottoms, I'm not aware of any
"depleted ocean fish stock" problem that's a loss of total biomass. What we've
seen with e.g. the cod off of New England is the suppression of an apex
predictor to the point where many suspect it has been replaced by new apex
predators that have prevented its revival to commercially significant numbers.

Bad news if you love the taste of cod (as I do, I showed up in the Boston area
in its waning days) but not quite the same thing.

That said, iron is said to be the limiting micro-nutrient in the oceans
(mostly in the context of CO2 geo-engineering) so adding that to an area would
be a first step to achieving greater biomass. But it still wouldn't bring back
the cod :-(.

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pyre
To some extent, I find it kind of disheartening that the only reason that you
care about over-fishing and the possible extinction of species is how it
affects your dinner plate... (i.e. If you didn't like the taste of cod, then
you wouldn't care about it at all.)

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hga
Errr ... I'm not sure where you came to that conclusion from what I said. I
follow the cod situation because of "how it affects [my] dinner plate" and
because I had a near front row seat to the whole mess for a dozen years, I
don't follow the blue-fin? tuna one closely because I don't care all that much
about them. And, yeah, I was raised by a fisher and _very_ serious hunter and
I often view animals through the lens of their ending up on my dinner plate.

None of that has anything to do with how much I might care about "possible
extinction", which is something I'm mostly resigned to (e.g. see the passenger
pigeon), except ... as far as I know, we're not talking about that with former
apex predators. It 's just that their stocks are no longer commercially
viable, the theory here being that they are now prey.

That might result in them going extinct, but I don't think that's the default
assumption. I bet if you wanted to set up a cod fish farm it wouldn't be _too_
difficult to get wild-type breeding stock to start with. No one's done that
(as far as I know) since there are other areas with cod and similar fish that
haven't seen a population collapse.

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robinhowlett
But wasn't this the expected outcome by people who actually work in this
industry and knew the type of oil being released into the Gulf?

From the sources I read, this is what they said would happen. But this didn't
sell as well as the catastrophic view point.

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83457
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1297820...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129782098)

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Rhapso
You know, this makes sense. Bubbles of oil have risen from the ocean bottom
before, (no I cannot find a reference, I am disappointed by this, but if
humans can cause it then nature can do worse more often) and we have not found
any big dead spots in the ocean floor. It makes since either it happens
incredibly rarely or the ocean's ecosystem had a natural defense to the
problem.

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natch
Anyone know if there are any extra dangers from eating shrimp that have been
chowing down on these microbes?

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tocomment
Sorry this is probably dumb question but does this imply the oil is mostly
cleaned up now?

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patrickgzill
So what happened to the benzene in the crude oil? Did the microbes eat that
too?

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aresant
Reading "light sweet Louisiana crude" actually made me hungry. Sounds like a
Cajun dish . . .

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chadmalik
then why did the BP people need to dump untold gallons of corexit in the gulf?
that was idiotic.

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sukuriant
They probably didn't know about these microbe's effectiveness. That, and there
was so much publicity about the problems that they had to do ~something~ ---
doing nothing would have been taken even worse by the public. Seriously,
imagine BP saying, "uh ... yeah, there's not a problem, billions of tiny
microbes are going to take care of our accident." People would have mocked
them plenty, and their PR guys wouldn't want that.

