It's Friday, November 16th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds up to date. I'm

Indravis Gontas. And I'm Kishore Hari. Anything catch your eye in the news this week?

Yeah. So you remember that old deep water horizon oil spill from like, say, a decade ago?

Oh, yeah. That was, that's probably still causing ecological damage in the Gulf.

Yeah, and we don't hear a lot about it. So I wanted to do a little bit of research to see if there are any studies that have come out recently talking about the extended effects of the oil spill.

And sure enough, just this week, there was a paper published in scientific reports about stingrays, one of my favorite marine animals.

How do stingrays? What do they have to do with the spill? Well, stingrays have a very strong sense of smell. So their olfactory system is very important to them. That's not only how they get around, but it's also how they stay safe.

And of course, the olfactory system is one that it can be directly affected by what's in the water.

Because essentially the receptors, you know, there's a mucus membrane,

but other than that, there's really nothing separating the receptors from the seawater.

So the oil spill, which still

has left a significant amount of oil in the seabed, can potentially have a direct effect

on the olfactory system of the stingrays. So what these authors did, this is from a university in Florida, the Florida Atlantic University.

They took about, they sort of recreated what the seabed might be like by adding crude oil

to, you know, their kind of the bottom of their tanks.

And so they had a control condition, which it was just normal.

And then one with the crude oil. And they put the stingrays in there for 48 hours, and after only 48 hours of

exposure to the crude oil, they found significant effects, significant impairments in the

olfactory function of these stingrays. So just two days of sort of swimming around in this in this mimicked seabed

that had the crude oil in it really sort of damaged their sense of smell. And this this bed that

they created, it's not so different than what you would experience in the Gulf in terms of,

obviously in terms of the crude

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