Conservation palaeobiology of oil-polluted marine biota

The project is designed to analyze the effects of chronic pollution by off-shore oil and gas fields on marine life. During an environmental monitoring program carried out in the southern Arabian Gulf, water, sediment and benthic marine life samples were collected in the vicinities of four fields. Pollution effects will be evaluated by classical benthic ecology methods and by an innovative approach which evaluates the agreement between the death and living assemblages: a mismatch between the composition of a time-averaged death assemblage of molluscan skeletal remains and the associated living assemblage can be reliable and conservative evidence for human-induced change in shallow-marine habitats. This approach focuses on shelled molluscs, which leave durable post-mortem remains, and their significance as surrogates of the entire community will be tested. Most importantly, absolute dating of shells will be performed to better assess the causes of potential mismatch between the living and dead assemblage and to give a chronological perspective over the effects of pollution. Indeed, the age of shells in the death assemblage can give information on the modifications of the benthic community. This can be put in the relation to the age of oil fields to understand the timing of deleterious effects of pollution on the community. Quantification of dead-live agreement and shell dating are palaeontological techniques that this project will use to assess present-day ecological dynamics. They are tools of the emerging new research field of conservation palaeobiology. Analytical taphonomy and shell dating will optimally blend marine biology and palaeontology techniques to yield new multidisciplinary insights into a key issue of our times the degradation of marine habitats by human activity.