California’s most productive fisheries? Offshore oil rigs

Science Focus

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Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

One of the more unusual recent developments in ocean conservation has been the use of artificial reefs. Old ships and even old subway cars have been used to create environments for fish to congregate in areas of the seafloor that are otherwise featureless. But it's not clear whether these habitats provide a place for fish to gather or actually boost the fish populations in the area.

A new study looked at the productivity of a different sort of artificial reef: the oil and natural gas rigs that dot the state's coastline. The report finds that the oil rigs are the most productive fisheries ever measured—not only in California but in the entire world. The report notes that many of these platforms will be obsolete over the coming decades, and we might want to think about what we do when we're done using them for their original purpose.

There are different ways of measuring an ecosystem's productivity. One is primary productivity, or how much carbon dioxide is converted into useful organic molecules by plants and other photosynthetic organisms. Then there's secondary productivity, defined as how much of that finds its way to herbivores and predators. In this case, the authors were interested in fish, so they focused on secondary productivity.

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