Oil platforms off the Southern California coast are some of the world’s most productive marine fish habitats, according to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings could have important policy implications for the decommissioning and construction of oil platforms, wind farms and other offshore structures.
“Given the hundreds of thousands of fishes that sometimes live around these platforms, these results were not a complete surprise,” said Milton Love, a research biologist with UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute.
Love and a team of marine biologists from Occidental College and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) are the first to estimate rates of production for the entire community of fishes associated with oil platforms. The researchers then compared these rates to previous research that made similar measurements in highly productive estuary, coastal lagoon and coral reef ecosystems.
