Toxicity Studies with an Oil-Spill Emulsifier and the Green Alga Prasinocladus Marinus

Abstract

There is now much information from field observations and laboratory experiments on pollution by oil and oil-spill removers (‘detergents’) in inshore waters and littoral habitats in SW England following the wreck of the Torrey Canyon on the Seven Stones Reef. Field observations with particular reference to plant life were reported by O' Sullivan & Richardson (1967), Spooner (1967), Nelson-Smith (1967), and Bellamy et al. (1967). A detailed survey of the biological effects of the disaster has been published (Smith, 1968). Further data dealing with littoral and sublittoral algae have been reported by Ranwell (1968), Bellamy & Whittick (1968), Boney (1968) and Nelson-Smith (1968). It has been shown from both field observations and laboratory experiments that the larger fucoid algae were more tolerant of both the oil and the oil-spill removers than the smaller algae in the region of high-water mark.