Isla Arena, Mexico-- Octopus season is in full swing in the Bay of Campeche, the waters of the Gulf of Mexico alive once again.
In many ways, the 1979 Ixtoc oil rig blowout is a distant memory.
However, the discovery of apparently leftover tar balls from Ixtoc on a rocky shore is black gold to researcher Otto Ortega.
In a laboratory at the University of Campeche, Dr. Ortega is studying the role microbes play in naturally breaking down oil.
Six weeks ago, Ortega put tar samples in two separate flasks, but gave the microbes in one a little help, adding nutrients.
"It's basically gone," he says of what had been a formerly black tar ball that now is virtually without color.
These micro-organisms, billions of them in the jar, are nature's way of dealing with the naturally-occurring seepage of oil from the ocean floor.
Through a combination of higher temperatures, salinity and other factors, scientists believe the Gulf of Mexico is better suited to break down oil than any other body of water on the planet.
"It's been really a permanent phenomenon happening," Ortega said.
No one knows how well nature is suited to dispose of a spill as gargantuan as BP's.
At Texas A&M's Corpus Christi campus, Dr. Paul Montagna believes all of the focus on the shoreline misses the point.
"It's almost as if, out of sight, out of mind," Montagna said.
What's not documented is the effect on creatures in the deep sea, especially those that spawn in the late spring and early summer.
Blue Fin Tuna, for example, hatch their young annually in the vicinity of the Macondo well, at precisely the time when BP was belching one thousand backyard swimming pools worth of oil into those waters.
"The adults can swim through the oil and they're fine," Montagna said.
But he fears the babies, the eggs, will die.
"Imagine a year when no human babies were born, the kind of effect that would have on populations."
The spill occurred, coincidentally, about one mile from a spot where Texas A&M researchers had sampled sea life over several years.
"We gave that station the nickname, 'highpro,'" Montagna said, for "high productivity. It was actually one of the areas of the whole Gulf of Mexico that has the highest productivity."
The Gulf was in trouble long before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, suffering environmental insults from the so-called dead zone of low oxygen to coastal erosion.
"It's easy for an individual to point at BP and say, 'they're the bad guy because they caused this spill,'" said Dr. Wes Tunnell, associate director of Texas A&M's Harte Research Institute.
Tunnell hopes the spill finally draws interest to plight of the world's oceans, from overfishing to condo development on barrier islands.
"All of those things are because of our population increases and the desires that we have to either enjoy the environment or eat the environment in the seafood case," Tunnell said.
"It's hard to point the finger at ourselves if we're one of those that are eating it."
The Ixtoc spill spewed about two-thirds the amount of oil as the BP disaster, but in only 170 feet of water.
Because the Deepwater Horizon had punched into the sea floor at 5,000 feet, researchers fear their playbook for shallow water spills may not apply.
"We also know that life happens at a slower pace in the deep sea," Montagna said. "So, I would imagine that the recovery rates are going to be a lot lower and a lot slower in the deeper parts of the Gulf than we would see up in shallow regions."
Tunnell laments the lack on long-term data from Ixtoc, or virtually any other past spill.
"After we cap them and we clean them up, basically all the research funds dry up and that's happened almost everywhere," Tunnell said.
For example, a couple years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska, the herring population fell off a cliff.
Research money had, by then, largely dried up, and the evidence against Exxon was only circumstantial.
BP promises $500 million for academic research, transparent and open to peer review.
"We were just elated," Tunnell said, "like, finally, we're going to be able to have 10 years of study here."
However, he notes only about $30 or $40 million has actually been dedicated so far.
"That other $450 million, we're still waiting for that to be announced."
A BP spokesperson today reiterated the company's commitment to fund the research.
"You are in a privledged position to perform long-term research," said the University of Campeche's Ortega. "The problem is sometimes we want to get answers in very, very short terms and natural communities do not work that way."
If Ixtoc is the model, a recovery may be well underway, but some veterans of past spills worry all of the other pressures may bring the Gulf to a tipping point.
"I'll be very surprised if we don't see some parts of that food web altered in some very dramatic ways for decades to come," Montagna said.
