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Journal article
Temporal variability of microbial response to crude oil exposure in the northern Gulf of Mexico
Frontiers in ecology and evolution, Vol.11, 1096880
02/13/2023
Web of Science ID: WOS:000937809500001
Abstract
Oil spills are common occurrences in the United States and can result in extensive ecological damage. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the largest accidental spill recorded. Many studies were performed in deep water habitats to understand the microbial response to the released crude oil. However, much less is known about how planktonic coastal communities respond to oil spills and whether that response might vary over the course of the year. Understanding this temporal variability would lend additional insight into how coastal Florida habitats may have responded to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. To assess this, the temporal response of planktonic coastal microbial communities to acute crude oil exposure was examined from September 2015 to September 2016 using seawater samples collected from Pensacola Beach, Florida, at 2-week intervals. A standard oil exposure protocol was performed using water accommodated fractions made from MC252 surrogate oil under photo-oxidizing conditions. Dose response curves for bacterial production and primary production were constructed from H-3-leucine incorporation and C-14-bicarbonate fixation, respectively. To assess drivers of temporal patterns in inhibition, a suite of biological and environmental parameters was measured including bacterial counts, chlorophyll a, temperature, salinity, and nutrients. Additionally, 16S rRNA sequencing was performed on unamended seawater to determine if temporal variation in the in situ bacterial community contributed to differences in inhibition. We observed that there is temporal variation in the inhibition of primary and bacterial production due to acute crude oil exposure. We also identified significant relationships of inhibition with environmental and biological parameters that quantitatively demonstrated that exposure to water-soluble crude oil constituents was most detrimental to planktonic microbial communities when temperature was high, when there were low inputs of total Kjeldahl nitrogen, and when there was low bacterial diversity or low phytoplankton biomass.
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- Title
- Temporal variability of microbial response to crude oil exposure in the northern Gulf of Mexico
- Publication Details
- Frontiers in ecology and evolution, Vol.11, 1096880
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media Sa
- Number of pages
- 14
- Grant note
- University of West Florida Office of Undergraduate Research BP/The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative as part of the C-IMAGE II Consortium
- Copyright
- © 2023 Brock, Richardson, Ederington-Hagy, Nigro, Snyder and Jeffrey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
- Identifiers
- WOS:000937809500001; 99380190897306600
- Academic Unit
- Hal Marcus College of Science and Engineering ; Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation
- Language
- English