Oil Rigs Make Surprisingly Productive Homes for Fish

A leaky oil rig may be absolutely terrible for our ocean's ecosystems, but what about one that's functioning perfectly? A recent study has determined that large oil or gas platforms off the California coast are actually serving as ideal bases for highly productive marine habitats, boasting a stunning amount of healthy aquatic life.

That's at least according to a study recently conducted by researchers from Occidental College, the University of California, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management off the West Coast.

The study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), details how fish communities that have made their homes under well-maintained oil rigs are up to 27 times more productive than California reefs.

And while reef communities may not be at their best along the West Coast due to increasing ocean acidification, warming waters, and general pollutants, the same rig-based habitats were found to boast 10 times more fish than the most productive reef habitats around the world.

This was determined after a research team annually surveyed 16 oil or gas platforms and seven rocky reefs along the Californian coast for 15 years, starting in 1995. (Scroll the read on...)

They paid special attention to fish population count, size, and diversity in these unique habitats. From this, they worked out the weight of fish supported each year per square meter of sea floor for each habitat. They even reportedly accounted for the chance that some fish "just passing through" could affect the data.

In a surprising show of data, the researchers determined that the productivity of rig-based communities supported 105 to a whopping 887 grams of fish per square meter of habitat. By comparison, the most productive reef they examined, a coral reef in Mo'orea, French Polynesia, had a fish productivity of 74.2 grams per square meter per year.

So what the heck is going on here? Study author Jeremy Claisse told New Scientist that it's really just about surface area and how high these platforms reach from the ocean floor.

"The platform structures support a diverse community of invertebrates that, along with floating resources such as plankton, provide the base of the food web supporting fish," he explained.

If handled properly, Claisse and his colleagues add, man-made structures can actually be beneficial to the ocean floor.