Column One: Millions of sea creatures lived on the Elly platform — Will they survive the oil spill?
Perched high above the waves about nine miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, the oil processing platform known as Elly looks like an industrial eyesore — a tangle of hard metal surfaces, cranes and pipes.
As of now, nobody knows for sure how the oil spill will affect the abundant marine life living on the rig itself. It’s not a surprise that animal life has congregated on the submerged infrastructure of Elly, said Milton Love, an ichthyologist at UC Santa Barbara who studies how rigs function as fish habitat.
Lobsters have been known to live in submerged toilet bowls, while sarcastic fringehead fishes have been found living in beer bottles that landed on the ocean floor, he said. Still, Love said there is something particularly special about Elly and the rig sitting right next to it, known as Ellen.
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