OIL
POLLUTION RESEARCH
Much early
pollution was by fuel oils from the bilges and fuel tanks of ships.
Legislation passed in the 1920s prohibited the discharge of oily
water in coastal waters in Europe and the United States and
reflected a growing concern about oil in the sea. After World War
II, energy demands burgeoned, and the oil industry rushed to keep
pace. Enormous quantities of crude oil began to be transported over
the seas, especially from the Middle East to Europe. Recovery
commenced of the oil resources of the continental shelf. These
developments produced a quantum leap in both the amount of oil
being added to the sea and in the potential for massive spills.
Although there
were some investigations of the effect of oil on aquatic life early
in this century, scientific interest has greatly increased since
the 1940s. In the early 1950s much work was devoted to determining
the effects of the developing Gulf Coast oil fields on the
shellfish and fishing industries (). In the 1950s and 1960s oil
pollution research received an added boost as a number of major oil
spills were studied. These include the Tampico Maru wreck in
Baja California (), the Chryssi P. Goulandris and others in
Milford Haven in the United Kingdom (), the well known Torrey
Canyon in the English Channel (), the Santa Barbara "Platform
A" blowout (), and the small but harmful oil spill from the barge
Florida at West Falmouth, Massachusetts ().
With the surge
in oil pollution research, the studies began to fall into several
general categories. The first is that of post-accident studies.
These efforts usually suffer from a lack of planning and too little
background information to use for comparison. The two most
thoroughly studied spills, the Torrey Canyon and the West
Falmouth spill, received concerted scientific attention because
they happened literally at the "back door" of two of the world's
most renowned marine research institutes, the Marine Biological
Association of the U.K. and the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, respectively. Unfortunately, very few stretches of the
world's coastline are within close reach of the wide variety of
scientists and equipment required to study a spill properly.
The second
approach to the study of the biological effects of oil is
experimental; selected species are exposed, under laboratory or
controlled field conditions, to oil or to the chemical dispersants
used for cleaning spills. Such a "bioassay" approach is traditional
in pollution ecology. Acute lethal effects of a pollutant are
measured over a standard time period (often forty-eight or
ninety-six hours). Longer-term tests may also be run using chronic
sublethal doses of the pollutant. Recent work has placed more
emphasis on understanding mechanisms of chronic sublethal stresses,
which may affect physiology, reproduction, and behavior. These are
generally felt to be very important but are more difficult to study
than lethal effects.
Just as there
are limitations to after-the-fact studies of spills,
there