Aging oil rigs are saving the lives of countless fish, including overfished species that are making a comeback because juvenile fish use the rigs as a refuge. The Guardian reports that off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, there is a disused oil platform where marine biologists recently
saw hundreds of thousands of juvenile rockfish finding shelter amid the hulking metal structure, alongside waving white anemones, clusters of mussels, and silver jack mackerel.
The seasoned marine biologists have been observing this remarkable spectacle for years. Holly, which was put out of use in 2015, is one of 27 oil rigs built off the coast of California decades ago that have become hotbeds of biological activity.
While not natural structures, their platforms have been embedded into the muddy seabed long enough to become part of the ocean environment, providing a home for creatures like mussels and barnacles, which in turn attract larger fish and sea lions that find safety and food there.
After two and a half decades of studying the rigs, Bull says it’s clear to her: “These places are extremely productive, both for commercial and recreational fisheries and for invertebrates.”
According to a 2014 study they co-authored, the rigs were some of the most “productive” ocean habitats in the world, a term that refers to biomass – or number of fish and other creatures and how much space they take up – per unit area. The research showed the rigs to be about 27 times more productive than the natural rocky reefs in California.
Jeremy Claisse, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona who co-authored the study with Love and Bull, said: “In college and grad school, you always read about how productive coral reef ecosystems and these estuary ecosystems are, and to do the math and find out these are as productive for fishes as those systems – that was pretty surprising.”
Subsequent studies showed that some species of rockfish produce 10 to 100 times more eggs and larvae at these platforms than at natural reefs. That’s partly because many big adult fish are being caught by fishers at natural rocky reefs, but less so at rigs, where they have more protection.
In some cases, the platforms are actually important to the populations of fish as a whole. In 2000, Love found that in the slow-growing rockfish bocaccio, a commercially important but overfished species, the rigs were home to one-fifth of the average number of juvenile fish that survive each year….
the variety of sea life … has been astounding…there are probably billions of creatures – from barnacles to mammals – that rely on the rigs for habitat.
Technological advances can be good for fauna or flora. The invention of the automobile restored New England’s forests, which previously had been mostly cut down to grow hay for horses. Millions of acres reforested in states like Vermont after the spread of automobiles made it unnecessary to grow hay for the legion of horses that formerly were needed for transportation in the northeast.
In the 16th century, beavers were hunted to extinction in England for their fur and meat. But now that England can import clothing and meat, it no longer needs to kill such wildlife, and beavers have been reintroduced to the London region. A baby beaver was recently born in London for the first time in 400 years. Last year, beavers were reintroduced to England’s capital city as part of a flood management project.
Technological advances also save people from drudgery. A restaurant chain is now using robots to chop up kale, cheese, and other ingredients of its signature salads. Robot waiters are spreading in restaurants in Korea. The world’s first humanoid robot factory is opening.
Doctors recently used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery. Doctors recently did the first robotic liver transplant in America. Robots can fit in small spaces in people’s bodies that a surgeon can’t reach without cutting through living tissue, or doing other collateral damage.
Scientists recently engineered bionic silkworms that spin fibers six times stronger than Kevlar.
