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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 12:31:09 PM   
Hillwilliam


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Status: offline 		I cant think of a metabolic pathway that utilizes carbon as an energy source and doesnt use Oxygen or Sulfur.

There are a lot of rather exotic chemosynthetic metabolic pathways but they are more associated with hydrothermal vents, hot springs and Lithophyles (literally bacteria that live inside rocks, also spelled lithophiles in some journals)

We DONT want Hydrogen Sulfide producing anaerobes working on this stuff as that is orders of magnitude more toxic than CO2

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 12:45:19 PM   
Sanity


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Actually Bill, the sources I used in this thread are the Associated Press and Reuters, which had you read the OP and the first page of the thread you might have known that. Besides Prince William Sound being colder than the Gulf as I wrote previously I doubt there are the same naturally occurring oil seeps up there harboring these microbes. And its not the deep water temps that are critical in Prince William Sound accident either, is it. That oil was spilled much closer to the surface in an area that has a very cold climate compared to anywhere in the Gulf.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam

Sanity, your original post was about this wonderous new COLD WATER bacteria that is eating the spill. Temps it is found in are 4-5 degrees Celsius which is colder than the average temperature of surface water in the Prince Edward sound.
The longer you stick with this post, the more holes get shot in it.
You need to start getting your info from someplace a little more scientifically knowledgable than Rush or Beck or the Washington Times.


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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 12:59:32 PM   
Hillwilliam


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Status: offline 		I'll say it again and hopefully clearer. DEEP water in the gulf of Mexico, meaning below the thermocline that is at approximately 200 meters below the surface is a constant 4 degrees Celsius (39 F +/-). Surface water in the Prince William Sound Spends a significant portion of the year WARMER than that and the year round average temperature is around 4 C. One of the reasons that PWS was selected as the terminus for the pipeline is that it is a relatively warm water, ice free port. (relatively warm meaning you would survive 60 seconds unprotected in the water in the winter instead of 30 LOL).

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 1:22:31 PM   
Sanity


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Status: offline 		Spin it all you want but theyre completely difference climates with the Sound being much much colder (especially in winter) with the added fact that there are no oil seeps there that Im aware of harboring these bugs. The spills were much different as well, its as if youre trying to deny that the sun shines during the daytime. 

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 1:34:30 PM   
Archer


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Status: offline 		It's not the temperature keeping them from existing up at PWS it is the fact that they don't have the seeps.

No food no bacteria. they are not going to evolve in an area where there are no natural seeps to feed them.

4 degrees C at 200 ft in the Gulf of Mexico where these bacteria live is not different than 4 degrees C at 200 ft outside of PWS.
You're not going to get sea water much colder than 4 degree C except in winter because that is the temp where density starts to do that funky shift. So it rises until the temp rises and then it sinks again.

If you transferred the bacteria from the gulf to PWS then they would eat until they ran out of food and then they would die. They would not replenish themselves and establish a colony because they would all starve to death before the next meal.







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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 2:22:45 PM   
Rule


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam
I cant think of a metabolic pathway that utilizes carbon as an energy source and doesnt use Oxygen or Sulfur.

I cannot proffer a bacterium that does it, but conceivably chloride might be used as the reductor. There is a lot of chloride in the sea.

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 2:59:20 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Rule

quote:

ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam
I cant think of a metabolic pathway that utilizes carbon as an energy source and doesnt use Oxygen or Sulfur.

I cannot proffer a bacterium that does it, but conceivably chloride might be used as the reductor. There is a lot of chloride in the sea.



reductor?

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 3:21:00 PM   
DomKen


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam

I cant think of a metabolic pathway that utilizes carbon as an energy source and doesnt use Oxygen or Sulfur.

There are a lot of rather exotic chemosynthetic metabolic pathways but they are more associated with hydrothermal vents, hot springs and Lithophyles (literally bacteria that live inside rocks, also spelled lithophiles in some journals)

We DONT want Hydrogen Sulfide producing anaerobes working on this stuff as that is orders of magnitude more toxic than CO2

I can't say I've exhausted the known extremophilic bacteria but I'm not finding any known metabloic pathway that could start with alkanes and no O2 that has an end product not toxic or horribly bad in some other way. It seems most of the anaerobes like to emit stuff like methane, ammonia or H sulfide.

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 3:25:47 PM   
Sanity


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Probably. I cant disagree with this, though the spill at the sound was a surface spill wasnt it, vs. the deep water spill in the gulf.

Surface ocean temps vary widely and there is UV at the surface, but i dont know if thats a consideration or not.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Archer

It's not the temperature keeping them from existing up at PWS it is the fact that they don't have the seeps.

No food no bacteria. they are not going to evolve in an area where there are no natural seeps to feed them.

4 degrees C at 200 ft in the Gulf of Mexico where these bacteria live is not different than 4 degrees C at 200 ft outside of PWS.
You're not going to get sea water much colder than 4 degree C except in winter because that is the temp where density starts to do that funky shift. So it rises until the temp rises and then it sinks again.

If you transferred the bacteria from the gulf to PWS then they would eat until they ran out of food and then they would die. They would not replenish themselves and establish a colony because they would all starve to death before the next meal.









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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 5:31:04 PM   
yummee


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quote:

ORIGINAL: samboct

In response to the Louisiana shrimp eating post-the gulf of Mexico is a big place. If you sample 200 sites- well, that can sound like a lot, until you realize how big the gulf is relative to the size of the plume. Not finding the plume doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, just that it hasn't been found yet. While it's possible that the failure to find the plume means that the microbes have chewed it up, an equally parsimonious interpretation is that the searchers simply haven't looked in the right place for it. Or that the dispersants injected at the well head did their job, and that the oil has less cohesiveness than other slicks and hence, the plume is rather more dispersed than expected. But we certainly don't have a good handle on the chemistry going on here, therefore it's premature to cheer that we don't have a problem.



Yes, it is a huge place. Many fishing grounds are closed due to the leak; however, many are open and being fished. The seafood from those grounds, all grounds fished, are tested. We aren't shrimping in a plume. Also, it isn't just BP looking for a plume. Louisiana fisherman are looking for the plume ... people trying to protect their livelihood. They really really really want to find it if it is there. As it stands, BP has agreed to pay fisherman for their lost income. They have also hired all the fishermen who want to work on the cleanup to do so. The pay they earn for cleanup will be deducted from the amount they would be paid for their claim. So, you can sit at home and get paid or go out and work your butt off and get the exact same amount. Yet, they are out there in droves searching and cleaning. There definitely is oil out there, but there are also fishing grounds unaffected. The Gulf seafood on the market has been tested and is being eaten without ill effects. Please don't buy Chinese!

quote:

ORIGINAL: BoiJen

The FDA requires that any new product must also have independent trial results within a percentage of what the production company claims it to have. The idea is that study results from groups that have the studies paid for by the production company aren't really valid because of the tendency to pay off the scientists doing the research in company funded studies.



BP is paying for as much as we can get them to pay for. That doesn't mean they have control over the results. No one here trusts them one iota. It's not like we are just taking their word for things. That lesson was learned early on.

quote:

ORIGINAL: BoiJen

Now, I have to ask, what level of oxygen is considered "depleted"? What happens if a "dead zone" does occur? How does the environment compensate? How are oxygen level s restored to an area?

Not understanding the impact of that possibility other than "that sounds like it could be bad" makes it hard to comprehend potential problems associated with what we're being told.

boi



Oxygen depletion is a common annual event during algae blooms in the heat of August usually. It typically happens in areas with little current and results in what we call "fish kills." Everything that lives in those waters die: fish, crabs, shrimp, eels, all of it. We just had one a couple of days ago at Bayou La Loutre. It was investigated and determined to be naturally occurring, although I disagree. It wasn't common there until a rock dam was build to prevent large vessels from entering. Problem is, when you dam off the large vessels, you also dam off the current from the shipping lane. At any rate, it wasn't oil leak related. I think the constant currents and waves help to keep depletion pockets from forming.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/08/gulf-oil-spill-fish-kill-louisiana.html

I've always wondered why the oxygen levels drop so much in an algal bloom. I mean, they produce oxygen, right? I understand the fish kills since many algal blooms naturally produce toxins. I just don't know why the bloom (which seems to me should be producing oxygen) combined with the lack of anything consuming oxygen (since everything was killed by the toxin) ends up with oxygen depletion.

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 5:57:03 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: yummee




I've always wondered why the oxygen levels drop so much in an algal bloom. I mean, they produce oxygen, right? I understand the fish kills since many algal blooms naturally produce toxins. I just don't know why the bloom (which seems to me should be producing oxygen) combined with the lack of anything consuming oxygen (since everything was killed by the toxin) ends up with oxygen depletion.



They produce oxygen during the day but consume oxygen at night. Generally more production than consumption. But if there are environmental imbalances (lack of sunlight due to clouds or cloudy water, lack of some and/or over abundance of other nutrients) the consumption outweighs the production, depleting net oxygen, leading to fish kills.

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 6:06:33 PM   
yummee


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quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

They produce oxygen during the day but consume oxygen at night. Generally more production than consumption. But if there are environmental imbalances (lack of sunlight due to clouds or cloudy water, lack of some and/or over abundance of other nutrients) the consumption outweighs the production, depleting net oxygen, leading to fish kills.


Thank you, Daddy! :)

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 6:14:48 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: yummee


quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

They produce oxygen during the day but consume oxygen at night. Generally more production than consumption. But if there are environmental imbalances (lack of sunlight due to clouds or cloudy water, lack of some and/or over abundance of other nutrients) the consumption outweighs the production, depleting net oxygen, leading to fish kills.


Thank you, Daddy! :)


yw.

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 7:24:46 PM   
Hillwilliam


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Status: offline 		Im going to go back to the original article here. Hazen said that "these bugs have adjusted (I assume he means adapted) over millions of years to seek out any petroleum......."

Bacteria are literally a "bag of enzymes" they do not "seek out" anything.
They have no sensory aparatus, they do not respond to stimulus in any way shape form or fashion. They cannot navigate. They cannot "seek" as they are incapable of movement over macroscopic distances. Most bacteria do have flagella (It's one of the toughest electron micrographs you will ever take) but their motility is measured in tens of microns per minute. They are simply there and dormant or semidormant. when food shows up, they simply "wake up" and eat it and hopefully reproduce and if enough of them reproduce, they will start to concentrate whatever toxin they are specialists at to keep the competition and sometimes predators away. Then, when the food runs out, they go dormant again, sometimes for centuries, untill they bump into more.

I HOPE for Mr Hazen's sake that the above is a journalist trying to "jazz up" the story and taking some literary license. I even saw one version of the story where the bacteria "wait for a petroleum source and migrate". I look forward to seeing the original article in Science because if I had an undergrad in one of my old classes writen something like that, it would have been, at best, a C-.

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/26/2010 7:28:11 PM   
Hillwilliam


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Sanity


Probably. I cant disagree with this, though the spill at the sound was a surface spill wasnt it, vs. the deep water spill in the gulf.

Surface ocean temps vary widely and there is UV at the surface, but i dont know if thats a consideration or not.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Archer

It's not the temperature keeping them from existing up at PWS it is the fact that they don't have the seeps.

No food no bacteria. they are not going to evolve in an area where there are no natural seeps to feed them.

4 degrees C at 200 ft in the Gulf of Mexico where these bacteria live is not different than 4 degrees C at 200 ft outside of PWS.
You're not going to get sea water much colder than 4 degree C except in winter because that is the temp where density starts to do that funky shift. So it rises until the temp rises and then it sinks again.

If you transferred the bacteria from the gulf to PWS then they would eat until they ran out of food and then they would die. They would not replenish themselves and establish a colony because they would all starve to death before the next meal.









For a deep water spill, there was a heck of a lot on the surface.

Reference the NASA photos I posted earlier.

Face it, the entire water column (about 1.5 km worth) was affected.


It's a good thing that BP's 'pet scientist' says there is nothing to worry about.

I wonder if he used to work for Phillip Morris?

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/27/2010 12:13:54 AM   
Hippiekinkster


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quote:

ORIGINAL: tazzygirl

While it may sound unbelievable... is it possible?
I suppose it is possible. It could very well be that the Corexit 9500 has emulsified and dispersed the oil to such an extent that it it only slightly toxic to anaerobic bacteria that live that deep.

If that is indeed occuring, one must ask whether the oil and the dispersants will prove to be toxic over the long term to those microbes. We simply don't know.

There are a lot of questions to be answered, I think.

I fervently hope that the long-term damage will be minimal, but those who are trying to score political points from this disaster are fools.

The proof is in the research. Science is God.

I'm not a pathologist, microbiologist, or any other kind of student of tiny living things. Chemistry was (is) my kink, but I don't remember any of it. Except for Dalton's law of Partial Pressures, the Nernst equation, chirality, nucleophilic substitution reactions, Gibbs free energy, pi and sigma bonds, and I know the molecular weights of a couple elements. Sucks to forget stuff.


< Message edited by Hippiekinkster -- 8/27/2010 12:36:50 AM >

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/27/2010 3:12:09 AM   
Sanity


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From: Nampa, Idaho USA
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quote:

ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam
For a deep water spill, there was a heck of a lot on the surface.


You dont believe it was a deep water spill?

And what was on the surface was in a totally different climate than that in Prince William, worlds apart.

quote:


Reference the NASA photos I posted earlier.


Thin silver ribbons of oil  is what it showed, which are no different than whats been posted before.

quote:


Face it, the entire water column (about 1.5 km worth) was affected.


Fore a time, in a small area relative to the overall size of the Gulf.

quote:


It's a good thing that BP's 'pet scientist' says there is nothing to worry about.


You have nothing better so you choose the slander and smear approach? Reeks of desperation. Why do you need crisis... is it like Rahm Emanuel said, you should never let a good crisis go to waste, but before you can USE a crisis you must first create one?

quote:


I wonder if he used to work for Phillip Morris?



And again, its interesting to see Liberals deriding Berkley U. 



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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/27/2010 4:29:41 AM   
Hillwilliam


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Status: offline 		Uh sanity, Who the fuck said I was a liberal?


Im a person with a science background who has forgotten a lot more microbiology, chemistry and physical oceanography than you ever knew. (aqpparently that isnt saying a hell of a lot)

1. The guy apparently wrote a report (unless the journalist reporting on it made it unrecognizable) that wouldnt pass muster in a Jr level undergrad course.

2. Your Exxon Valdes every year from natural seeps is quite possibly (Im being nice here) bullshit.

3.Your 'tiny little ribbons of surface oil', based on the width of the main channel of the Miss river are apparently a couple of MILES wide and over a HUNDRED miles wrong. (I'll let ya in on a deep dark secret here, when you take pics with a handheld digital camerra from the ISS a coupla hundred miles up, to even see it, it has to be HUGE)

4. It has already been PROVEN that BP spread false information about the magnitude of the spill. (lied?)

#1. Above is why I called him BP's 'pet scientist'. If someone has been paying your salary for 10 years, you tend to do things to put them in the best light neh? The only mistake he made is writing for folks with the intellectual capacity of.......... well you.

Just because someone disagrees with a right winger on a matter of science (that said right winger apparently has NO knowledge of nor any desire to obtain said knowledge) doesnt make them a liberal.

Why arent you calling Archer a liberal?

He apparently also thinks you're full of crap on this one.

As for your constant whining that "it's just a tiny bit of the gulf" and the 'stuff is so diluted that noone can see it', Tell that to the folks in Minimata bay.

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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/27/2010 5:19:51 AM   
BoiJen


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Hillwilliam

Uh sanity, Who the fuck said I was a liberal?



Because it's more important to throw politics around as the reason things aren't ok rather than facing the social and physical science of a situation.

BP lied in the first place. This is a fact. BP, once it started paying people for work lost, instituted a contract of non-disclosure for people who accepted money that they should have been entitled to in the first place. This is a fact. Companies routinely hire or keep on staff an "expert" to back up any claims they need to make. This is a fact. Oil can make water "bad" for living creatures and isn't really meant to be consumed by most animals. This is also a fact.

Politics aside, taking in these and previously stated scientific facts, it's hard for any reasoning person to simply take at face value that the "oil is gone and everything is ok." Primarily, because not seeing the oil doesn't mean it's all "gone", nor does the oil being broken up mean that the level of toxicity to the area is "gone".

To come out and say "everything ok, nothing to see here!" Smacks of "I'm trying to cover my shit up...I fucked up really bad...please stop looking at my mistake and making me accountable." And that's exactly what BP is doing right now.

boi


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RE: Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study - 8/27/2010 5:38:35 AM   
mnottertail


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Status: offline 		Yeah, I'm with Archie all the way on this one, this wonderbug or miraclebug sounds alot like cold fusion, something is way the fuck amiss here.

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