A 15 year study of the oil platforms off the California coast shows that they promote a rich and varied fish and marine life. They are greater than at estuaries and reefs on the California coast and richer even than at the famed coral reefs of Polynesia.
Don’t expect the WWF to support offshore oil rigs anytime soon! Or to admit that the oil rigs off the Santa Barbara coast are more beneficial to marine life than the wind and solar farms in California are to avian life which they regularly chop and fry.
More fool them.
JT Claisse et al, Oil platforms off California are among the most productive marine fish habitats globally, PNAS, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1411477111
A recent study has determined that large oil or gas platforms off the California coast are actually serving as ideal bases for highly productive marine habitats, boasting a stunning amount of healthy aquatic life.
That’s at least according to a study recently conducted by researchers from Occidental College, the University of California, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management off the West Coast.
The study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), details how fish communities that have made their homes under well-maintained oil rigs are up to 27 times more productive than California reefs.
…. This was determined after a research team annually surveyed 16 oil or gas platforms and seven rocky reefs along the Californian coast for 15 years, starting in 1995.
They paid special attention to fish population count, size, and diversity in these unique habitats. From this, they worked out the weight of fish supported each year per square meter of sea floor for each habitat. They even reportedly accounted for the chance that some fish “just passing through” could affect the data.
In a surprising show of data, the researchers determined that the productivity of rig-based communities supported 105 to a whopping 887 grams of fish per square meter of habitat. By comparison, the most productive reef they examined, a coral reef in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, had a fish productivity of 74.2 grams per square meter per year. …
….. “The platform structures support a diverse community of invertebrates that, along with floating resources such as plankton, provide the base of the food web supporting fish,” he explained.
If handled properly, Claisse and his colleagues add, man-made structures can actually be beneficial to the ocean floor.
Abstract
Secondary (i.e., heterotrophic or animal) production is a main pathway of energy flow through an ecosystem as it makes energy available to consumers, including humans. Its estimation can play a valuable role in the examination of linkages between ecosystem functions and services. We found that oil and gas platforms off the coast of California have the highest secondary fish production per unit area of seafloor of any marine habitat that has been studied, about an order of magnitude higher than fish communities from other marine ecosystems. Most previous estimates have come from estuarine environments, generally regarded as one of the most productive ecosystems globally. High rates of fish production on these platforms ultimately result from high levels of recruitment and the subsequent growth of primarily rockfish (genus Sebastes) larvae and pelagic juveniles to the substantial amount of complex hardscape habitat created by the platform structure distributed throughout the water column. The platforms have a high ratio of structural surface area to seafloor surface area, resulting in large amounts of habitat for juvenile and adult demersal fishes over a relatively small footprint of seafloor. Understanding the biological implications of these structures will inform policy related to the decommissioning of existing (e.g., oil and gas platforms) and implementation of emerging (e.g., wind, marine hydrokinetic) energy technologies.
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