[lyka_candelario]

During Mexico’s oil spill in 2010, a lot of sea creatures were affected. Like for the cetaceans (whales and dolphins); since these animals need to surface the water to breathe, there is a tendency that the oil from the top can enter their blowholes, eyes, and even mouths. When this happens, such creatures may have difficulty in breathing, seeing, and may later on develop internal organ damage, respectively.

Same goes for the sea turtles; oil entering into their body can be very harmful. Hatchlings or baby turtles, due to their size, may also have trouble surfacing the oil-filled water to breathe, causing their eventual death.

Seabirds when they go diving for fish can be covered in oil and may have a hard time flying again or may be totally unable to do so. They may also have the tendency to leave their eggs behind, when their habitat is damaged by the oil spill.

For fishes affected by the oil spill, oil droplet ingestion would be the main problem. Larvae and other fishes tend to take in anything they come across in the water, which would include the oil droplets. Such ingestion is known to cause physiologic problems, mutations, and even death.

The oil spill can also affect wetlands. It was shown that there were extensive damage to algae, coral reefs, sea grasses, and mangroves after the Mexico incident. This is of concern since these areas serve as feeding grounds and even nurseries to a great number of marine species which later migrate to the ocean.

Usually when an oil spill happens, a chemical dispersant is sprayed onto oil slicks to break up oil particles and accelerate its dispersion. However, such can cause an adverse effect to organisms involved. A recent study even suggests that this kind of treatment might actually be more dangerous than the oil spill itself. It was a study conducted by Professor Guy Claireaux from the University of Brest, France. It was discovered that though the dispersants reduce negative effects to surface organisms, such chemicals can also cause contamination to creatures underneath.

Science daily asserts, “Though applying dispersants at sea may reduce the environmental and economic impacts of an oil spill reaching the shoreline, these results show that the choice of response deployed to deal with a spill involves a trade-off between the effects at the surface and in the water column.”