Campeche, Mexico-- In the Bay of Campeche, stuck deep in the mangrove trees, rests a piece of maritime history.
The rusting steel ball, a buoy from a doomed oil rig, is all that remains on the surface of the Ixtoc One.
Accessible only by boat, the buoy floated over 100 miles from the spill site in the months after the Ixtoc blowout, then got a little help from nature in finding its final resting place.
"It made its way all the way over here when Hurricane Gilbert passed by," said Bernabe Pastra, a local fisherman.
The was 1988, nine years after Ixtoc suffered a massive blowout and led to what had been the Gulf of Mexico's worst oil spill.
At the time, Texas A&M marine biologist Wes Tunnell and other researchers feared the worst.
Tunnell recalls his reaction as being, "Oh, no, this is going to kill everything in the area. It's going to wipe it out."
Over the last 31 years, Tunnell has surveyed the effects of the spill and admits to being a bit baffled at the Gulf's recovery.
In places smothered in Ixtoc oil, the seafood harvest fell by up to 70 percent the following year.
However, by the early 1980's, fin fish and octopus, staples of the Mexican seafood industry, had bounced back.
"Natural environments are resilient and they will come back from disturbances," said Paul Montagna, Tunnell's colleague at Texas A&M's Harte Research Institute.
Think of it, Montagna says, as being like a pristine forest that has suffered the ravages of fire. A year or so later, nature invariably stages a rally.
Yet, even in Mexico, the recovery is not complete.
Fisherman Waeiler Gomez was 10 years old when the spill drove a black tide of oil into the mangrove trees, where oysters once thrived.
Gomez, "Chooko" to his friends, says it took only a matter of days to decimate the species.
"That's the first thing that got exterminated," Chooko said.
The mangrove oyster once provided local fishermen and their families a bounty.
"The whole family ate from the root of oysters," Chooko said, recalling how his father would return home from fishing, loaded down with oysters.
"They would cut off the mangrove, choose the juiciest oysters and take it home," said Julio Sanchez, a marine biologist on staff at the University of Campeche.
The Mexican government tried and failed to re-grow the mangrove oysters, which now appear to number only a fraction of their pre-Ixtoc population.
"Some did grow a little bit," said Sanchez, "but even the fishermen would say they tasted like oil."
Although the loss of the oyster fishery would seem to sound a warning for Louisiana, the mangrove oysters are an entirely different species.
Still thriving along other parts of the Yucatan coast are reef oysters, similar to those found in the northern Gulf.
Leonardo Perez, a fisherman and netmaker in the island community of Isla Arena, complains not enough is known about populations in these waters prior to Ixtoc.
"Nobody had made a study of (how many) oysters were there before the oil spill, but it was a lot," Perez said.
That leaves researchers with not much more to go on than fish stories.
"We need to get some good scientific evidence," said Texas A&M's Tunnell, who has been urging his Mexican counterparts to conduct more thorough census studies of fish populations.
In that sense, Mexico's great blowout is a story of lessons lost, and for researchers following the current spill, an opportunity missed.
A paper published last March by a pair of European researchers laments the lack of hard data on seafood landings in the year following the spill.
Zoologist Olof Linden and Professor Arne Jernelov noted in a report for the United Nations that "overall statistics for 1979 and 1980 indicate "no decrease in the amount of fish and shellfish landed in Mexican harbors."
However, the report points out the figures are skewed, since Mexico included landings of octopus in its statistics for the first time in 1980.
Ironically, some researchers believe the closure of fisheries following the spill may have provided a necessary break to species that had been overfished.
"Whenever you stop all fishing in an area for a period, they do get a break," Tunnell said.
Ixtoc forever changed the lives of fishermen in the Yucatan, but in the tiny fishing villages that endured the gulf's second worst spill, all is not lost.
