Effect of Louisiana sweet crude oil on a Pacific coral, Pocillopora damicornis.

Recent oil spill responses such as the Deepwater Horizon event have underscored the need for crude oil ecotoxicological threshold data for shallow water corals to assist in natural resource damage assessments. We determined the toxicity of a mechanically agitated oil-seawater mixture (high-energy water-accommodated fraction, HEWAF) of a sweet crude oil on a branched stony coral, Pocillopora damicornis. We report the results of two experiments: a 96 h static renewal exposure experiment and a "pulse-chase" experiment of three short-term exposure durations followed by a recovery period in artificial seawater.