blog # 19

Chang, un-Juang, Gregory A. Davis, Sarah J. MacNaughton, John R. Stephen, Albert D. Venosa, , , and David C. White. Microbial Population Changes during Bioremediation of an Experimental Oil Spill.  Applied and Environmental Microbiology.  65.  (1999): 3566-3574.  Print. 

Some mistakes are impossible to fix.  After oil spills, it is hard to recover the environment and make it how it once was. Even if rescue groups were to clean the marshes and coasts, they would still be removing much-needed nutrients in the process.  In an experiment conducted at the Center for Environmental Biotechnology, at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, Tennessee, where plots were treated with non-oil, oil alone, oil plus nutrients and oil plus nutrients plus indigenous inoculum.  The results were significant.  The environments introduced to oil developed a certain type of bacteria whereas non-oil environments did not.  This evidence shows that the oil in the environment causes new bacteria to grow.  According to the Applied and Environmental Microbiology Journal, “microbial community structures of the oiled plots were becoming similar to those of the unoiled controls from the same time point, but DGGE analysis suggested that major differences in the bacterial communities remained,” (n.p.)  Fromt his we can infer that in some respects, environments introduced to oil can sometimes fix themselves.  But most of the time these oil spills will permanently damage an environment.  This can be seen in the show, Firefly,  because sometimes, the crew’s mistakes are forgiven (or fixed) and sometimes they are not.  The sheriff forgives the crew’s actios, and Niska, the crime lord, did not forgive them.  This is a good example of the choices people can make concerning situations and how their choices can reveal their character.