Baby fish show up in big numbers despite spill

By Ben Raines, Press-Register
Sunday, September 26, 2010, 5:00 AM Baby snapper are everywhere. So are baby trout, grouper and grunt. Early results from an annual count of juvenile fish in grass beds scattered around the northern Gulf of Mexico suggest that the larvae of some species survived the oil spill in large numbers, according to the scientists involved. “My preliminary assessment, it looks good, it looks like we dodged a bullet. In terms of the numbers of baby snapper and other species present in the grass beds, things look right,” said Joel Fodrie, a researcher with the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science who has been studying seagrass meadows along the coast for five years. His group has sampled aquatic life in grass beds in Alabama, Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle. The group will sample around Louisiana’s Chandeleur Islands this fall. At the height of the spill, when millions of gallons of oil were floating on the surface, scientists said that one of the critical questions for the health of the Gulf was whether the trillions of larvae hatched offshore each spring could survive the pollution. The larvae are the young of most everything that swims in the Gulf, from crabs and shrimp to fishes great and small. The tiny creatures drift on ocean currents for weeks before settling in various habitats — including seagrass meadows, oysters reefs and fields of floating sargassum far offshore — depending on the species. Fodrie’s survey provides one of the first measures of how many larvae survived, although his findings apply only to the species that settle in grass beds. “Grand Bay looks like Grand Bay in terms of the number of juvenile fish,” he said. “Petit Bois Island looks like Petit Bois looks every year. The Dauphin Island grass beds look like Dauphin Island. The most unusual thing we are seeing are the incredible numbers of young speckled trout.” … “We can only talk about the young fish that colonize the grass beds,” he said, “but those species look like they are in good shape.” Fodrie said, “We’ve seen more speckled trout in Grand Bay than we’ve ever seen anywhere else along the coast. There are literally millions of speckled trout in the water. The ones we’ve cut open have been eating a ton of shrimp. The snapper have been eating little worms, crustaceans, shrimp and even really small fish.” …

Baby fish show up in big numbers despite Gulf of Mexico oil spill (with video, photos)