Prior exposure to weathered oil influences foraging of an ecologically important saltmarsh resident fish.

ABSTRACT: Estuarine ecosystem balance typically relies on strong food web interconnectedness dependent on a relatively low number of resident taxa, presenting a potential ecological vulnerability to extreme ecosystem disturbances. Following the Deepwater Horizon (DwH) oil spill disaster of the northern Gulf of Mexico (USA), numerous ecotoxicological studies showed severe species-level impacts of oil exposure on estuarine fish and invertebrates, yet post-spill surveys found little evidence for severe impacts to coastal populations, communities, or food webs. The acknowledgement that several confounding factors may have limited researchers' abilities to detect negative ecosystem-level impacts following the DwH spill drives the need for direct testing of weathered oil exposure effects on estuari

SUBMITTER: McDonald AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8742545 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature