WEST ANGLE BAY: A CASE STUDY. THE FATE OF LIMPETS

The Sea Empress oil spill was an extremely traumatic event, both for limpets and their observers, but it provided the marine biologists at Orielton Field Centre with a quite remarkable natural experiment. The pollution dramatically reduced limpet densities and so facilitated colonisation of the shore by palatable red and green algae - which, in turn, enabled the surviving limpets to grow rapidly and reach a large size. Despite the major perturbation of limpet populations between 1995 and 2000, the situation in 2001 seemed to be very similar to that prior to the spill with high densities of small limpets.