Marine life dramatically declined in Gulf in years after BP oil spill, study finds

Marine life dramatically declined in.

Key points

• FILE – A sizeable plume of smoke rises from BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 21, 2010.
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• While krill that whales and others eat plummeted 72%, according to a major multi-year study published Monday, fish populations dropped by regarding 60%.
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Marine life dramatically declined in Gulf in years after BP oil spill, study finds. By: Seth Borenstein, Associated Press – October 20, 2026.

FILE – A sizeable plume of smoke rises from BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 21, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File).

While krill that whales and others eat plummeted 72%, according to a major multi-year study published Monday, fish populations dropped by regarding 60%. Researchers remarked there's no other cause they could find for the drop except the BP oil spill.

WASHINGTON (AP) – In a deep, dark part of the Gulf of Mexico, the number of marine animals plummeted by regarding 60% in the years after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, a new study discovered.

In a crucial part of the Gulf between the light surface and the darkest depths, where the BP-operated well failed and dumped 134 million gallons of oil, the number of fish discovered dropped by 63.5% from the year after the spill to 2015. Crustaceans, including shrimp and krill, a key food for whales, went down 62%, and larger animals like squid and octopuses fell 59.7%, according to a study published Monday in the journal PNAS. And those populations haven't come close to recovering, the study discovered.

Researchers focused on the ocean's "twilight zone, " a vast area above the seafloor, where much of the surface marine life, including dolphins and whales, feast on creatures. Yet little is known regarding this gigantic ecosystem, and this region of the Gulf had not been studied before the 2010 spill, stated study lead author Tracey Sutton, a biological oceanographer at Nova Southeastern University.

Notably, a 2011 post-spill exploration cited in the research. It applied six sets of nets at different depths and acoustic sonar, provided scientists a good sense of how much sea life was in the area between the surface and 5, 000 feet deep (1, 500 meters). They returned to the same place with the same equipment three-and-a-half years afterwards and identified sea life was between one-third and one-quarter of what it was in 2011.

"We saw this big decline, " Sutton remarked. "The question was then why? So we looked at all of the natural variables we thought could account for it, namely temperature, oxygen supply and food. None of those vary with the decline. In practice, the event that did was the oil spill. So we think that's the most probable cause of the decline."

Researchers kept on sampling since 2015 and the low populations remained, with a slight rise in 2022 and 2023 that did not prove statistically significant or lasting, Sutton remarked.

Sutton's team documented the population declines with three different lines of evidence: what they caught in the nets, what their acoustic sonar discovered and genetic studies showing the species losing genetic diversity as of inbreeding.

For context, a lot of marine life died instantly after the explosion. It killed 11 workers, and from almost five months of leaking oil and gas. Those pollutants obtained stored in the eggs of survivors and subsequent generations of critters secured more compromised and weaker, Sutton noted.

BP spokesperson Paul Takahashi remarked the accident "forever changed" the business: "We have made many changes intended to help prevent an event like this from ever happening again."

Both the oil and the dispersants applied to clean the spill hurt fish, but in different ways, stated study co-author Isabel Romero, a chemical oceanographer at the University of South Carolina. Oil is more toxic and an overall threat, but the dispersant breaks the oil into smaller droplets, increasing the exposure of animals that live in the deeper water column, she remarked.

Dispersants caused plenty of difficulties, and new studies show that in future accidents, it would be better to avoid those chemicals and instead add agents that growth oil-munching microbes, remarked former National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell, a University of Maryland environmental microbiologist who headed a 10-year, $500 million BP-funded program to study spill effects.

Sutton remarked his team couldn't prove an exact causal link to the BP oil spill, but by eliminating the other possibilities and looking at the timing, it's logically clear that the spill caused the challenge.

In practice, the krill population dropped 72%. Lanternfish – odd fish with blue-green lights embedded over their bodies – are a third of what they applied to be, Sutton stated. The stunning but scary dragonfish – with sharp teeth, light organs and a lure attached to its head – additionally had sizeable losses, he noted.

"These are foundational species, " Sutton remarked. "They're the things most things eat. So it's no wonder that we had wholesale changes throughout the community." The inner ocean is more unknown than outer space. Scientists learned much regarding this unexplored area of the Gulf.

"One of our biggest findings from the whole thing is how connected the whole oceanic Gulf is from top to bottom because the animals move up and down, " Sutton remarked. "There are predators at the top that dive deep. Lots of things that are deep that come up at night. So the system is one particularly substantial pulsing system, rather than just a layered system like individuals might have thought beforehand." Outside scientists were especially bothered by where the spill damaged.

"We know more regarding space in some ways than we do concerning the inner ocean. Since we can't see these regions, there is a tendency to assume everything is fine, but here we have a clear result showing that something went highly wrong, " Scripps Institution of Oceanography marine scientist Kaitlin Frasier noted in an email.

Frasier, who wasn't part of the study published Monday, published a post-spill study in 2024 looking at Gulf of Mexico whales and dolphins, finding population drops as high as 83%.

"It's shocking how a single failure in a drilling rig can have this vast and sustained impact over thousands of square kilometers, with little visible recovery over 13 years after the spill, " remarked Dalhousie University marine scientist Boris Worm. This person wasn't part of the study. "It is important that we see this, because for the longest time these consequences were completely out of sight and out of mind."

Worm and Colwell remarked this damage should be kept in mind as the world negotiations regarding deep-sea mining and climbed oil drilling in deep waters. Regarding the Author(s). Seth Borenstein, Associated Press. News Bill Barrow, Associated Press October 19, 2026.

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Taken together, the developments around marine life dramatically declined in Gulf in years after BP oil spill, point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.