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Environmental research
Bacteria make a meal of oil at
ANTARES deep-sea station
Even if oil transportation safety
has been greatly improved over the last decades, significantly lowering
accidental oil spills, hundreds of millions of liters of petroleum still
enter the environment from both natural and anthropogenic sources every
year. Furthermore, as the more accessible oil reservoirs are being
emptied, marine and particularly deep-sea reservoirs are becoming the "new
Eldorado for black gold", generating new threats to marine ecosystems as
shown by the recent and dramatic BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil
spill. After the sinking of the tanker "Prestige" (which sank at a depth
of 2400m-depth) or the explosion of the "Deepwater Horizon" offshore oil
drilling rig (at 1260m-depth), many questions remain about the fate and
environmental impact of the spilled oil in deep-sea environments. In the framework of the French
national program ANR POTES (Pressure effects On marine prokaryotes), the
in situ biodegradability of heavy fuel oil (Prestige oil) and its impact
on the biodiversity of sedimentary microbial and macraufaunal communities
were determined at the ANTARES site at 2400m-depth. |
 Sediment was distributed into PVC cores with or without a massive addition of Prestige fuel oil (~9 g kgô1 dry wt) and integrated in experimental devices. This experimental device was deployed using the ROV Victor at 2400 m water depth using the manned submarine Nautile (Ifremer). |
Bientot, une traduction franôaise de ce texte. |
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Sediments from the water/sediment
interface at a 2400 m depth were sampled with a multicorer at the ANTARES
site off the French Mediterranean coast and were promptly enriched with
Maya crude oil as the sole source of carbon and energy. Alkane-degrading
bacteria belonging to the genera Alcanivorax, Pseudomonas, Marinobacter, Rhodococcus and
Clavibacter-like were isolated, indicating that the same groups were
potentially involved in hydrocarbon biodegradation in deep sea as in
coastal waters. The results also confirm that members of
Alcanivorax are important
obligate alkane degraders in deep sea environments, and coexist with other
degrading bacteria inhabiting the deep subsurface sediment of the
Mediterranean (Tapilatu et al., 2010). The fact that bacteria make a meal
of oil at ANTARES deep-sea station was further confirmed by the observed
typical microbial alteration of n-alkanes
of the Prestige fuel oil during the experiment. Interestingly, long term
macrobenthic recolonisation and sediment reworking activity do not seem to
have been affected by the contamination (Cuny et al., in prep.).
Contact person: P. Cuny (philippe.cuny@univmed.fr)
References cited.
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Author : Thierry Stolarczyk
