by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 07.29.07
While they may help clean up oil spills, chemicals known as dispersants may actually cause much more harm to the corals than the oil itself, according to research done by a team of marine scientists from Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography in Haifa.
These special chemicals break up oil slicks on the surface into tiny droplets to help disperse the spills. Because coral reefs are often located along coastal areas where oil production and transportation centers are common, they are sometimes the victims of accidental spills and are thus subjected to these dispersants. To determine their effect on individual corals, the scientists exposed small branch clippings, otherwise known as “nubbins,” of two species — Stylophora pistillata and Pocillopora damicornis, both found in the Red Sea — to solutions of 6 different dispersants for a period of 24 hours and monitored their health for the ensuing week.
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