'Frothy Gunk' From Deepwater Horizon Spill Harming Coral 149
sciencehabit writes "The massive oil spill that inundated the Gulf of Mexico in the spring and summer of 2010 severely damaged deep-sea corals more than 11 kilometers from the well site, a sea-floor survey conducted within weeks of the spill reveals. At one site, which hadn't been visited before but had been right in the path of a submerged 100-meter-thick oil plume from the spill, researchers found a variety of corals — most of them belonging to a type of colonial coral commonly known as sea fans — on a 10-meter-by-12-meter outcrop of rock. Many of the corals were partially or completely covered with a brown, fluffy substance that one team member variously calls 'frothy gunk,' 'goop,' and 'snot.'"
Re:Which is it? (Score:4, Informative)
You don't know the first thing about coral biology, do you?
A coral is a colony of many small polyps, sometimes living in symbiosis, or parasitosis with algae (Zooanthelae), which provide an additional energy source for the colony.
If the algae are expelled, the coral loses its color, and is said to be "bleached".
So, in almost half of the corals, a majority of the polyps died, or showed signs of severe stress. In a quarter of the corals, 90% of the polyps died. or showed signs of severe stress.
(Imagine you're a researcher examining the course of a smallpox epidemic several hundred years ago. The death records are grouped by parishes. Since most people did not often travel from village to village, but stuck to their local communities, it makes sense to talk about parishes in which "a majority" of the inhabitants died, and parishes in which "most" of the people died, and so on. In this case, the coral is the village; the polyp is the individual vilager.)