Toxic petroleum hydrocarbons are of concern in marine environments throughout the world. For the past 25 years, we have been studying the effects of oil spills on all levels of the marine food web, beginning with the world’s largest oil well blowout which occurred in 1979 in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico. Although most of that oil remained in the western Gulf, we subsequently found out that there were significant amounts of floating oil throughout the eastern Gulf and Caribbean that resulted from illegal discharge of oil from oil tankers. Although the amounts of oil in the eastern Gulf of Mexico have decreased in time due to more restrictive legislation and greater compliance, the incidence of oil spills throughout the world have continued to increase. In general, petroleum hydrocarbons found in subtropical marine environments appear to be lower than those found in more northern estuaries. This is likely due to a combination of greater sediment grain size in the subtropical estuaries and increased efficiency of microbial degradation due to higher temperatures and greater oxygen exchange in the sediments. Nonetheless, toxicity studies on several species of marine organisms indicate that even in subtropical systems, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon fraction of the petroleum can remain toxic for many years following an oil spill.
Representative publications:
Van Vleet, E.S., Sackett, W.M., Weber, F.F., Jr. and Reinhardt, S.B. 1983. Input of pelagic tar into the northwest Atlantic from the Gulf Loop Current: Chemical characterization and its relation to weathered IXTOC-I oil. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science 40: 12-22.
Van Vleet, E.S., Sackett, W.M., Reinhardt, S.B. and Mangini, M.E. 1984. Distribution, sources, and fates of floating oil residues in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Marine Pollution Bulletin 15: 106-110.
Van Vleet, E.S. 1984. Fingerprinting oil spills in the marine environment. Marine Technology Society Journal (Invited Review) 18: 11-23.
Van Vleet, E.S., Pierce, R.H., Brown, R.C. and Reinhardt, S.B. 1985. Sedimentary hydrocarbons from a subtropical marine estuary. Organic Geochemistry 6: 249-257.
Van Vleet, E.S., Joyce, R.M. and Sherwin, M.R. 1986. Comparison of anthropogenic hydrocarbon inputs to two subtropical marine estuaries. Science of the Total Environment 56: 221-230.
Van Vleet, E.S. and Pauly, G.G. 1987. Characterization of oil residues scraped from stranded sea turtles from the Gulf of Mexico. Caribbean Journal of Science 23: 73-83.
Zheng, W. and Van Vleet, E.S. 1988. Petroleum hydrocarbon contamination in the Dry Tortugas. Marine Pollution Bulletin 19: 134-136.
Barre, J.S., T.M. Bert, and E.S. Van Vleet. 1994. Toxicity of the water-soluble fraction of diesel fuel to postsettlement juvenile stone crabs (Menippe mercenaria). Bulletin of Marine Science. 55:240-246.
Levings, S.C., S.D. Garrity, E.S. Van Vleet and D.L. Wetzel. 1997. Sublethal injury to red mangroves two years after oiling. In, 1997 International Oil Spill Conference, Proceedings. Pp. 1040-1041.
Wetzel, D.L. and E.S. Van Vleet. 2001. Comparative studies on the toxicity of dispersants and dispersed oil to marine organisms - a three-year Florida study. 2001 International Oil Spill Conference Proceedings. March 26-29, 2001. Tampa, Florida.
