disturbance and recovery of salt marsh arthropod communities following bp deepwater horizon oil spill盐沼节肢动物群落的干扰和恢复英国石油公司深水地平线钻井平台原油泄漏事故.pdfVIP

Disturbance and Recovery of Salt Marsh Arthropod Communities following BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Brittany D. McCall, Steven C. Pennings* Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, United States of America Abstract Oil spills represent a major environmental threat to coastal wetlands, which provide a variety of critical ecosystem services to humanity. The U.S. Gulf of Mexico is a hub of oil and gas exploration activities that historically have impacted intertidal habitats such as salt marsh. Following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we sampled the terrestrial arthropod community and marine invertebrates found in stands of Spartina alterniflora, the most abundant plant in coastal salt marshes. Sampling occurred in 2010 as oil was washing ashore and a year later in 2011. In 2010, intertidal crabs and terrestrial arthropods (insects and spiders) were suppressed by oil exposure even in seemingly unaffected stands of plants; however, Littoraria snails were unaffected. One year later, crab and arthropods had largely recovered. Our work is the first attempt that we know of assessing vulnerability of the salt marsh arthropod community to oil exposure, and it suggests that arthropods are both quite vulnerable to oil exposure and quite resilient, able to recover from exposure within a year if host plants remain healthy. Citation: McCall BD, Pennings SC (2012) Disturbance and Recovery of Salt Marsh Arthropod Communities following BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. PLoS ONE 7(3): e32735. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032735 Editor: Dirk Steinke, Biodiversity Insitute of Ontario - University of Guelph, Canada Received December 5, 2011; Accepted February 3, 2012; Published March 7, 2012 Copyright: 2012 McCall, Pennings. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licen