Gulf spill harmed small fish, studies indicate

Two years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon well blowout, laboratory studies are finally offering clues to the spilled oil’s impact on sea life. Brief, very low exposures to oil were capable of killing many fish embryos and hatchlings, new studies show. Those that survived often exhibited major deformities that would diminish an animal’s fitness. Affected species ranged from the young of large open-ocean denizens, such as tuna, to minnow-sized coastal homebodies — the tiny fish that serve as lunch for everyone bigger. Many eggs refused to hatch, even though their embryos hadn’t died. Of those that did hatch, many of the fish exhibited heart, spine and other defects. The heart rate of hatchlings raised with heavily oiled sediment was only 60 percent of normal.A solution to this is to not put harmful chemicals that will kill the fish because we use fish to eat and we don't want to kill too many that we will run out of fish. Barries to this solution is we don't even realize sometimes how much waste and chemicals we put into the ocean. We aren't considerate of how many things we harm in the water by puMtting waste and chemicals into the water. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/346573/description/Gulf_spill_harmed_small_fish_studies_indicate