Interactions between Oil-Spill Pollutants and Natural Stressors Can Compound Ecotoxicological Effects

Coastal estuaries are among the most biologically productive habitats on earth, yet are at risk from human activities including marine oil spills. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill contaminated hundreds of kilometers of coastal habitat, particularly in Louisiana's delta. Coastal estuaries are naturally dynamic habitats where periodic and stochastic fluctuations, for example in temperature, salinity, nutrients, and hypoxia, are common. Such environmental variability regularly imposes suboptimal conditions for which resident species must continually compensate by drawing on diverse physiological abilities. However, exposures to oil, in addition to their direct toxic effects, may interfere with functions that normally enable physiological compensation for suboptimal conditions. This review summarizes the panoply of naturally-encountered stressors that may interact with oil, including salinity, hypoxia, pathogens, and competition, and the mechanisms that may underlie these interactions. Combined effects of these stressors can amplify the costs of oil-exposures to organisms in the real world, and contribute to impacts on fitness, populations, and communities, that may not have been predicted from direct toxicity of hydrocarbons alone. These interactions pose challenges for accurate and realistic assessment of risks and of actual damage. To meet these challenges, environmental scientists and managers must capitalize on the latest understanding of the complexities of chemical effects of natural stressors on organisms, and adopt integrative and holistic measures of effect from the molecular to whole-animal levels, in order to anticipate, characterize, diagnose, and solve, ecotoxicological problems.