OIL AND RELATED CHEMICALS - Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 76

unoiled locations, even years after the accident. Furthermore,
the toxicity of some oils to ish embryos is greatly increased
by light (phototoxicity). John Incardona and colleagues stud-
ied Paciic herring embryos following the Cosco Busan spill
in San Francisco Bay and found that components of the oil
accumulated in embryos, then interacted with sunlight at low
tide to kill them. Three months after the spill, embryos caged
at deeper sites in oiled areas had sublethal heart toxicity (as
expected from exposure to PAHs), but intertidal embryos that
were exposed to oil in the light had very high rates of mortal-
ity. The toxicity of dispersed oil tends to be higher than that of
crude oil.
After the Deepwater Horizon blowout, Gulf killiish
embryos exposed to sediments from areas that had been oiled
in 2010 and 2011 showed developmental abnormalities includ-
ing heart defects, delayed hatching, and reduced hatching suc-
cess. Killiish are abundant in the coastal marsh habitats and
are important members of the ecological community. Because
they are nonmigratory, measurements of their health relect
their local environment.
Atlantic bluein tuna and other large ishes spawn in the
vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon, raising the possibility that
their eggs and larvae, which loat near the surface, were dam-
aged by the oil. The developing hearts of tuna were found by
John Incardona and colleagues to be damaged by oil, which
interrupts the ability of the heart cells to beat effectively. Oil
interferes with heart cell contraction and relaxation—essential
for a normal heart beat. Authors concluded that deaths of early
life stages of Gulf populations of tunas, amberjack, swordish,
billish, and others that spawned in oiled surface habitats were
likely.
PAH-exposed ish may also develop tumors. Liver tumors
in English sole (bottom dwellers, exposed to sediments) in
Puget Sound were associated with PAHs in the sediments,
as seen by Myers and colleagues from the NOAA Lab in
Seattle. The ish with the highest frequencies of liver tumors