New Orleans, La. - When researchers from Tulane and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette began a study of blue crabs in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, they expected a big kill-off. However, their investigations have not indicated any obvious or dramatic mortality rates. The ongoing study is funded by the BP/Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative.
Six months before the spill, Caz Taylor, assistant professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and co-principal investigator of the study, was already researching crab movements along the coast.