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Figure 3.5 Benfield and his research team at sea in the Gulf of Mexico.
tific and Environmental ROV Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology, or SERPENT, project since 2006. SERPENT, a worldwide project, focuses on deep sea research through the use of remotely operated underwater vehicles, or ROVs, through long-standing partnerships with oil and gas corporations. Benfield’s project in the Gulf of Mexico used the Deepwater Horizon oil rig many times before the spill and, because of this, he has some of the only available baseline data and footage of the area. This information is very valuable to the scientific community, and while there are no results yet, Benfield’s data set is huge and promising. He and his research team also collected footage after the well was capped in August 2010, and have received funding through BP to continue filming and analyzing ROV footage of the area for the next several years. The longevity of this project is essential in order to address important considerations of the spill’s impact, including the approximate ecological recovery time and bounce-back rate of individual species. Prosanta Chakrabarty, curator of ichthyology at LSU’s Museum of Natural Science, had recently co-discovered a new species of batfish that coincidentally lived around deepwater oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.