RESEARCH ARTICLE
Successful Discrimination Using Otolith Microchemistry Among Samples of Red Snapper Lutjanus campechanus from Artificial Reefs and Samples of L.campechanus Taken from Nearby Oil and Gas Platforms
Lauren Nowling1, R.W. Gauldie3, J. H. Cowan, Jr.1, *, E. De Carlo2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2011Volume: 4
First Page: 1
Last Page: 9
Publisher Id: TOFISHSJ-4-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874401X01104010001
Article History:
Received Date: 18/06/2010Revision Received Date: 30/09/2010
Acceptance Date: 30/09/2010
Electronic publication date: 06/12/2011
Collection year: 2011
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
A total of 98 Lutjanus campechanus otoliths were analyzed by ICPMS from collections made from both artificial reefs and oil and gas platforms in Alabama and Louisiana over a two-year period from 2002 to 2003. The 15 stable isotopes analyzed in this study were 51V, 59Co, 62Ni , 64Zn, 66Zn, 65Cu, 107Ag, 109Ag, 110Cd, 111Cd, 114Cd, 206Pb, 207Pb, 208Pb and 238U. This suite of elements was chosen because they were most likely to be present at oil and gas platforms in the metals and other materials used in artificial reefs, and in the circulating heavy “muds” used while drilling wells. A series of statistical analyses were performed to establish the statistical structure of the data. Linear and stepwise discriminant analyses were performed to show that by using subsets of all the elements measured, it was possible to discriminate among artificial reefs and oil and gas platforms at average misclassification rates of the order of 10%.
