The 2007 Cosco Busan disaster, which spilled 54,000 gallons of
oil into the San Francisco Bay, had an unexpectedly lethal
impact on embryonic fish, devastating a commercially and
ecologically important species for nearly two years, reports a
new study by the University of California, Davis, and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The study, to
be published the week of Dec. 26 in the early edition of the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
suggests that even small oil spills can have a large impact on
marine life, and that common chemical analyses of oil spills may
be inadequate. "Our research represents a change in the paradigm
for oil spill research and detecting oil spill effects in an
urbanized estuary," said Gary Cherr, director of the UC Davis
Bodega Marine Laboratory and a study co-author. On the foggy
morning of Nov. 7, 2007, when the container ship collided with
the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, bunker oil contaminated
spawning habitats for the largest U.S. co