Volunteer scuba diver Gail Rainey tugged at the collar of her yellow-green wet suit, scratching at her neck and the back of her hand as she climbed back aboard the M/V Fling.
Despite Rainey’s discomfort, environmental scientist Steve Kolian couldn’t help but smile. He thinks the skin irritation suffered by Rainey and several other scuba divers on the Fling could eventually hold the key to possible cures for cancer and other human diseases.
Some of the organisms Kolian and the divers were collecting, such as hydroids and sponges, have stinging cells similar to those of jellyfish. If touched, they can cause rashes and swelling.
After each dive, Kolian and Louisiana State University graduate student Amy Atchison sorted through piles of colorful rock-like blobs and gelatinous goo spread out on the boat’s stern. Wearing heavy rubber gloves while stuffing the specimens into plastic bags, they prepared the items to be frozen and shipped to a laboratory in Florida.
“Ooh, this is the good stuff,” Kolian said, thrilled by the haul.
Kolian, whose research is not related to his job at the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Environmental Assessment, is working with Sammarco of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium to collect the animals and have them analyzed at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, Fla.
“This is a brand new frontier,” Kolian said. “We’re going to figure out if any of these things could have the cure for cancer.”
It’s not a far-fetched idea. Harbor Branch’s Division of Biomedical Marine Research already has hit on a compound found in a sponge that shows anti-cancer properties, said Peter McCarthy, associate division director at Harbor Branch, a nonprofit organization that researches issues related to oceans, estuaries and coastal regions.
“Our big success story is discodermolide, which comes from a deep-water sponge in the Bahamas,” McCarthy said. “It has anti-cancer properties and is in Phase I clinical trials.”
The creatures collected by Kolian and Sammarco will be added to a vast library of sea life that Harbor Branch is analyzing. “What we do is make an extract of them, so we have a solution of the chemicals and then save the rest of the specimen” for later use, McCarthy said. “It’s very exciting. People have only really begun looking at this area for drug discovery.”
McCarthy said Kolian and Sammarco’s specimens may be the first collected from oil and gas platforms for Harbor Branch. “Each of these platforms have unique environments, so this could be really interesting,” he said, adding that most of the specimens analyzed at the institute are collected by its own staff.
For Kolian, the collections are just part of his quest to persuade oil and gas companies and federal regulators to leave the platforms in place, even after they stop pumping.
Passionate about the structures’ ability to create marine habitat, Kolian has been researching an idea to use decommissioned oil and gas platforms for farming fish and other sea creatures, such as corals and live rock popular with the home aquarium trade.
He points to a program in Japan that uses offshore structures to farm fish.
“In Japan, offshore platforms and artificial reefs are installed specifically for marine ranching programs that release, train and feed juvenile fish in the open ocean for eventual recapture,” Kolian said, adding that the Japanese have even trained the fish to be fed on cue when music is played.
“Platforms provide the most prolific ecosystems on the planet . . .,” he said. “After their useful life in minerals production, oil and gas platforms could be redeployed into open-ocean marine aquaculture systems.”
Kolian, a Minnesota native who fished commercially in the Gulf as a youth, has written a paper about the economic and environmental potential of platform fish farming, and he has put up a Web site, www.towersoflife.com, to spread the message.
“The art of fishing in the future isn’t going to be catching fish, it’s going to be making fish on platforms,” he said.
By Susan Langenhennig, The Times-Picayune
