Sea Trout samples were obtained with the assistance of the National Atmospheric Oceanic Administration Research Vessel, the Oregon II and Dr. Chuck Weirich at Aqua Green. Wild alligator gar samples were collected with the assistance of Dr. Allyse Ferrara and Ricky Verrett at Nicholls State University. Control, hatchery reared juvenile alligator gar were provided

by Ricky Campbell and Carlos Echevarria of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The authors also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Robert Ford (retired biologist), and Dr. Janice Chambers and Jenny Wagner in the MSU Center of Environmental Health Sciences. “
“While major accidental oil spills from tankers are relatively CT99021 price rare occurrences, the transportation of oil remains one of the main concerns for the various stakeholders in the protection of the marine environment (Dalton and Jin, 2010). Not only

can oil spills have a devastating effect on the marine ecosystem (Lecklin et al., 2011), they involve high acute costs through clean-up operations (Montewka et al., 2013c), Akt tumor have a considerable impact on affected economic activities (Crotts and Mazanec, 2013 and Garcia Negro et al., 2009) and can have cultural and behavioral effects on local communities (Miraglia, 2002). As an aid in maritime transportation risk management, methods for quantitative risk assessment of maritime traffic have been developed (Özbaş, 2013). These provide insight in the spatial distribution of accidental risk of ship traffic, which can, see more when coupled to environmental sensitivity and risk analysis (Delpeche-Ellmann

and Soomere, 2013 and Singkran, 2013), provide input to maritime spatial planning (Frazao Santos et al., 2013) and planning of oil combating resources (Lee and Jung, 2013). Risk assessment methods can also be used to assess the effect of proposed risk control options (van Dorp and Merrick, 2011). Worldwide, ship groundings, collisions and fires are the most frequently occurring accident types (Guedes Soares and Teixeira, 2001) and also in the Gulf of Finland, groundings and collisions represent the majority of the accident types (Kujala et al., 2009). Assessing oil spills from such accidents thus is an important aspect of maritime risk assessment. In this paper, we limit the scope to cargo oil spill size assessment of a product tanker in a ship–ship collision, i.e. vessels with a deadweight between 10 k and 60 k (Evangelista, 2002). A number of oil spill models have been developed. Przywarty (2008) and Gucma and Przywarty (2008) report on an oil spill model based on the analysis of accident statistics, which cannot account for specific traffic characteristics. IMO, 2003 and IMO, 1995 presents a model for measuring the outflow performance of a particular vessel design against a reference double-hull design.