The Power Of Online-To-Offline Is Moving Beyond Local Commerce

While the idea of ‘online to offline’ for purchasing is proving to be powerful in the local commerce world, the trend of linking the physical world to the web is producing a number of startups that are innovating beyond just purchasing from local merchants or finding a product nearby. Many of the most interesting startups that have emerged over the past year or so are making our lives in the real world better; using data, location and curation as their competitive weapons.
And although these startups have presences on the web and mobile devices, they are also disrupting services in the physical world. So who are these startups that are taking the ‘online to offline’ trend to a whole new level? Below I discuss five different types of startups taking advantage of this trend: Uber, J. Hilburn/Trunk Club, Jetsetter, GetAround, Zaarly and Airbnb.
Uber
Take Uber, which allows you order a private car from an iPhone app at discounted rates. Basically, Uber allows you to order a black car to come to your location via the mobile app, and then watch it come to you as the app tracks the car via GPS. Payments are handled automatically by charging the card you have on file, and it costs at least 50% more than a taxi. The online to offline connection is obvious, as you order online for a car that picks you up in the physical world.
While Uber cars are more expensive, the benefit is that you don’t have to wait for a cab. All cars are town cars, so you’re getting a luxurious ride. Uber tracks all cars, so in case you leave something in the car, you’ll be able to track your car down. The startup has a loyal following in San Francisco and has since expanded to New York. And the service will eventually launch in Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and D.C.
The ability to pay and book a car online (based on your present location no less) and then use the car to arrive at a physical destination is no doubt disrupting the private car and taxi industries.
J Hilburn/Trunk Club
Want custom-designed clothes or a personal shopper to pick your wardrobe? No need to visit a custom tailor in your town or hire a stylist from Saks. J Hilburn and Trunk Club are two startups disrupting the men’s fashion industry and bridging the online to offline worlds.
J Hilburn offers an e-commerce site that allows men to buy custom-designed shirts and trousers online. The beauty of the site is that it offers designer-like styles for less. The company also employs a salesforce of 800 “style advisors” across the country, who make appointments to visit customers in their homes and offices. The advisors measure the customers, show them swaths of fabric, and help them select a few options. Revenue is growing fast, and men can find affordable custom made clothes by simple entering their measurements and sizing on the web, and have the clothes delivered to their door.
Similarly, Chicago-based Trunk Club offers men personal stylists to pick out clothing, which is delivered to customers’ homes. Men sign up via the website, pick preselected looks, and answer a small questionnaire with questions like “where do you shop right now?,” “what’s your favorite item in your closet,” sizes, price and color preferences and more. A stylist will then call/contact the customers via their preferred method of communication (many choose email). Once the stylist gets an idea of the customer’s style, he or she will send a “trunk,” of clothes and ship out via Fedex a handpicked collection of shoes, pants, shirts, and more. Clients keep the clothes they want and send back the items that don’t fit. You are only charged for the clothes that you keep.
Like J Hilburn, The Trunk Club buys clothing at wholesale and sells it at a normal retail markup. There are no sales/discounts on clothes and Trunk Club stocks its own inventory. Customers don’t pay anything extra for them as they would in a fancy department store.
Once again, an online experience is disrupting an offline experience in the physical world. In this case, Trunk Club and J Hilburn are making the physical acts of trying on clothes, finding custom made clothing and picking out clothes that match your style much more efficient by adding an online component.
Getaround
Getaround, which just won Techcrunch Disrupt in New York, is a car rental market place where you can rent a car by the day, hour or week through a smartphone app. Getaround’s all inclusive package, which includes insurance, 24 hour roadside assistance, a Getaround car-kit, iPhone app and a web app makes it easy for people to conveniently car share anywhere.
While GetAround is still new, the model has a lot of promise. GetAround disrupts car sharing similar to the way Airbnb disrupted the home rental and hotel industries. Both link the ability to monetize sharing of a physical property.
As of last week, the company had already signed up 1,600 cars for sharing, which is 20 percent of car-sharing giant Zipcar’s fleet of 8,000 cars.
Jetsetter
I am a huge fan of Jetsetter (and so is my colleague Sarah Lacy). The flash sales site for luxury travel has been innovating the hotel industry by allowing consumers to access the best hotels in the world at discounted prices. And the site goes beyond just commerce, even adding an editorial component to accessing information about hotels.
The company, which is a subsidiary of flash sales giant Gilt Groupe, has just unveiled a brand new service which essentially brings services of travel agents online. As Sarah Lacy wrote in her review, Jetsetter’s travel planning service is essentially a travel agent 2.0. Jetsetter is leveraging its network of more than 200 travel writers to help members plan itineraries for vacations. The service isn’t cheap. It costs $200 for three hours of consultation and a detailed itinerary, that their specialists will book and arrange for you at no additional cost. If you book a hotel through Jetsetter, you get $100 back.
While many people don’t use travel agents anymore because booking is so easy online, many travel booking engines miss the personal curation that that travel agents provide.
Airbnb
Airbnb, which launched in 2008, has been disrupting home-sharing for over three years now. As you may know, Airbnb lets anyone that owns space fit for accommodating travelers, whether that’s a couch in a small apartment or entire villages, post that space as a listing on its website and connect potential renters to its respective owners.
The company takes the physical act of renting rooms or spaces in other people’s homes and makes it much easier for users to access this online. The platform grew 800 percent in 2010, and is now being valued at $1 billion.
Airbnb is one of the best examples of a company that brought an online component to a real-world action. And Airbnb continues to disrupt additional markets as well. While there have been bumps in the road, the startup’s success is a testament to the power of the online to offline model.
Zaarly
Backed by an impressive list of investors, Zaarly, a web and mobile service that connects buyers and sellers in a localized market place. It’s sort of like a mobile-centric reverse Craigslist service.
On the site or via the startup’s mobile apps, you post what you’re looking for (i.e. cupcakes), how much you’re willing to pay for it and how soon you need it. Zaarly will then share your request in the local community through the platform, and also allows you also post your request to Twitter and Facebook.
People or businesses nearby can access and see your request and then anonymously message each other to complete the transaction of delivering the cupcakes you want. Sellers bid for the tasks, and the buyer chooses the best one, with Zaarly connecting the two via an anonymous Twilio-powered phone number. You can use cash or Zaarly’s integrated credit card payment system to pay for the transaction.
Zaarly just launched less than a month ago, so it should be interesting to see if it can find the success that Craigslist experienced.
These are just a few of the startups which are making improving our lives by linking the offline world online. Of course, the idea of linking the physical world online isn’t a new phenomenon. OpenTable and CraigsList have been doing this for years.
But of late, there’s been a proliferation of startups that have adopted the OpenTable or Airbnb model of linking online to offline  that have emerged. These startups are continuing to disrupt industries, such as car-sharing, customized travel planning, personal shopping, and more that have not had strong online presences. Essentially these startups make industries in the physical world more efficient, and thus make our lives better. The consumer is empowered with a better experience with the addition of a mobile technology or a web-based platform that saves time and sometimes money as well.
There’s no doubt that this trend will certainly continue as more startups bridge online to offline. It’s just a matter of which industry will be disrupted.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/05/the-power-of-online-to-offline-is-moving-beyond-local-commerce/

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Photos: Shape-Shifting Cuttlefish Can Mimic Pictures

No One Here But Us Plants

Photograph courtesy Justine Allen, Marine Biological Laboratory

During recent research into how cuttlefish adopt camouflage positions, a common cuttlefish (left) raises two of its eight arms in apparent mimicry of artificial algae placed in its tank. The animal reacted similarly when shown a photo of green algae, said biologist Roger Hanlon.
It's been known that many cuttlefish—and their squid and octopus cousins—adjust their postures and rapidly change color to resemble nearby objects, a strategy to evade predators. (See "Cuttlefish Change Color, Shape-Shift to Elude Predators.")
But the recent lab experiments are the first to confirm that cuttlefish use visual information to determine those gestures, according to Hanlon, of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
"Camouflage is one of the least studied subjects in biology. It would be nice if our paper encourages folks to look at this behavior more carefully in other animals," said Hanlon, whose new study was published May 11 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/pictures/110601-cuttlefish-camouflage-science-gestures-arms-mimic-nature/

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Is Motor Oil a Renewable Resource? Re-refiners Say Yes

A worker tests the viscosity of recycled base oil at the Evergreen Oil hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facility and re-refinery in Newark, California. In North America, only about 10 percent of used motor oil is re-refined.

Drivers think more about the gasoline or petrol they pay for at the pump than they do about the motor oil that has to be changed every few months.

But energy companies and environmentalists are focusing on ways to reduce the waste generated by this ubiquitous petroleum product. They’re even researching how the right formulas might significantly boost fuel efficiency.

Tens of millions of barrels of lubricant cycle through vehicle engines around the world each year—U.S. drivers alone produce about 1.3 billion gallons of dirty used motor oil annually. Too much of it—the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates 200 million gallons (757,082 liters)—is dumped illegally each year. Some is “recycled,” but with dubious environmental benefit; it typically ends up burned as a rather dirty industrial fuel source.

But there is another option: motor oil as a renewable resource. It’s possible to re-refine used motor oil, restoring it to “good as new” quality. Then it can be resold over and over again at about the same price per quart as conventional motor oil.

In Europe, about 50 percent of motor oil is re-refined, thanks to regulations dating to 1975 that were revised in 2008, say analysts at Kline & Company, a market research firm based in Parsippany, New Jersey. In North America, only about 10 to 15 percent of motor oil is re-refined. But that story is slowly changing as U.S. companies have begun to see a new market in “green” lubricant.

What Happens to Old Motor Oil?

The U.S. EPA has tried to highlight the threat of illegal used motor oil pollution with its “You Dump It, You Drink It” campaign. The agency estimates that the used oil from just one typical oil change could ruin a million gallons of freshwater—a year’s supply for 50 people.

The EPA also suggests that American do-it-yourself oil changers alone could recycle enough oil for 50 million cars a year if every drop of their old oil was collected at service stations and quick lubes, landfills, recycling centers, or auto parts stores.

(The American Petroleum Institute (API) maintains a website to help consumers locate motor oil collection and recycling centers.)

Service stations and quick lube centers already recycle the used oil they collect from paying customers, but “recycling” has different meanings. A 2005 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) study estimated that about 80 percent of all oil collected for recycling was burned as an industrial fuel for mills, boilers, kilns, power plants, space heaters, and the asphalt industry. This process gives used motor oil a second life but also produces significant emissions of heavy metals like lead and zinc, according to studies published in the peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society.

It’s unnecessary waste and pollution, when used motor oil can be cycled back into engine lubrication, says John Wesley, CEO of Wichita, Kansas-based Universal Lubricants, producer of ECO ULTRA re-refined oils.

“There’s no reason that 200 million gallons being dumped on the ground should ever occur,” he said. “It’s bad consumer behavior and it’s bad business.”

As for burning recycled oil for fuel, Wesley added, “most of the product goes that route but once it’s burned it’s gone forever.

“The highest value is the collection of used oil for the re-refining process,” Wesley said. “That’s why we’re in the business. We want to do the right thing ecologically and there is an economic benefit to doing this as well.”

That economic benefit allows companies like Universal Lubricants to produce re-refined oils that meet American Petroleum Institute and American Automobile Manufacturers Association quality certifications for performance in areas like cold-start ability, rust-corrosion control, engine wear, and high temperature viscosity tests.

Not only are these oils certified to the same standards as “virgin” motor oils, their retail prices are comparable as well.

Making Old Motor Oil Good as New

Internal combustion engines are made of metal parts in constant motion. Motor oil provides a necessary thin, lubricating film to make sure that they don’t come in contact with one another. This prevents wear on engine parts and reduces friction to minimize heat damage. Oil also helps to keep engine surfaces clean, makes start-up easier, and limits rust and corrosion.

Oil captures the contaminant by-products of combustion including carbon, soot, and heavy metals from engine wear. When these build up in oil over time, they reduce its effectiveness. Oil also contains performance-enhancing chemical additives, which make up as much as 15 percent of its total volume. These additives become depleted with wear so the processes they prevent, like corrosion or the sludge-forming mixing of oil and water, become problematic when oil has been used too long.

But the physical properties of motor oil itself don’t degrade. Re-refining uses a practice of vacuum distillation to remove contaminants such as fuel, water, or dirt from used oil to produce new “base oil.” The base oil is then blended with a fresh cocktail of additives like dispersants, detergents, and anti-foaming chemicals to restore the oil to its original effectiveness.

It takes about a gallon (3.8 liters) of used oil to make 2.5 quarts (2.4 liters) of re-refined motor oil, and the base stock can also be used to produce other lubricants like automatic transmission fluid or hydraulic fluid. That is a lot more efficient than producing “virgin” motor oil; it takes an entire barrel (42 gallons/159 liters) to produce the same amount, EPA statistics show.

All told, it takes only about one-third the amount of energy to recover re-refined base stock as it does to produce the same amount of base stock from crude oil, said Wesley. Using less energy means producing fewer carbon emissions. And the same oil can be re-refined over and over again.

Re-refined Motor Oils Going Mainstream

Kevin Ferrick of API says re-refined oil is gaining some traction in the marketplace.

“We don’t track sales of re-refined oil but I will say that there are definitely more and more brands coming online that are claiming some [percentage] of re-refined oil,” he said. “It’s interesting that some of these have been around for quite a few years now and some marketers chose not to make that claim of re-refined content.”

Because U.S. regulations did not require marketers to label virgin-equivalent products as re-refined, marketers didn’t broadcast they were selling recycled product, fearing consumer reluctance to use “old” oil. But now, companies are recognizing a marketing advantage.

“I’d say that because of increased environmental consciousness there seems to have been a change in attitude towards it,” Ferrick said.

Commercial fleets and the U.S. government often strive to use re-refined motor oil. California has an extensive re-refined oil program and the state’s agencies use about 189,890 gallons (718,811 liters) of re-refined oil each year, according to Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle).

Re-refined motor oil even has a presence on the NASCAR circuit through partnership with Safety-Kleen, the largest motor oil re-refiner in the United States. Safety-Kleen not only services race teams, but it collects motor oil for re-refining at NASCAR racetracks and team shops—some 185,000 gallons (700,300 liters) in 2010 alone.

Motor oil industry giants have taken notice and begun tapping into the re-refined market. In the spring of 2011, Valvoline rolled out its 50 percent re-refined NextGen oil. Valvoline’s re-refined content is limited to 50 percent, according to company statements, because there’s just not enough high quality recycled base stock available to increase that number and produce the oil in volume.

European Model Boosts Re-refining

But government policy can affect the availability and affordability of used motor oil for base stock dramatically. Less motor oil will be available for re-refining if power-hungry industries are willing to pay more for the dirty fuel. In the United States, the market limits the amount of used motor oil available for re-refining. But in Europe, government regulations have spurred re-refining.

“What’s common in the EU is that governments have created a market for this used oil,” Phadke said. "Regulations vary significantly by country. However a common tactic is to have a levy on lubricant sales which finances a collection agency. This way governments ensure that oils get collected."

Kline & Company’s data show that in Western Europe about half of all used oil is re-refined and only 40 percent is burned as industrial fuel. South America also re-refines a higher percentage of fuel than North America because of efforts in the continent’s largest market, Brazil.

“Brazil is very proactive,” Phadke explained. “Officially all used motor oil has to undergo re-refining in Brazil.”

Other regions, on the whole, do much less re-refining, according to Phadke’s studies.

“In Asia there are regulations on paper but they are often not enforced and there is often no infrastructure in place to ensure that the oil is actually collected,” he said. “In most of those markets you really don’t know what is happening to the used oil.”

Vehicles around the world produced some 3.7 billion gallons (14 billion liters) of used motor oil in 2009, according to Kline’s estimates, and the inclusion of dirtier industrial oils could nearly double that volume. About three-quarters of the world’s used oil was collected in 2009, the Kline study reported, but only 16 percent of that “recycled” oil ended up being re-refined for future use.

Alternative Oils Save Gas at the Pump

But there could be greater energy savings ahead in new motor oil technologies.

Synthetic motor oils are comparable to conventional products in emissions and energy requirements, but they run “greener” by boosting fuel efficiency and by simply doing their job for longer periods of time.

Full PAO synthetic oils (polyalphaolefin oils) use no petroleum base and are created by chemical processes that link carbon molecules together. Other oils labeled “synthetics” are created from crude oil base stocks that are subjected to more extensive treatments than regular oils. Some synthetic oils blend these two types into a single product.

Oil changes for synthetic users can be extended from 7,500 miles (12,070 kilometers) up to 25,000 miles (40,234 kilometers). That means much less oil entering the waste stream and less environmental impact from the burning of recycled oil or the energy costs associated with re-refining. Synthetic oil can cost five times more than standard oil, but less frequent changes may make the two economically comparable. Also, synthetics have benefits for performance and engine life as well.

“Typically, people talk about the potential to save one or two percentage points of total fuel use for cars using the best lubricants like synthetics,” said Therese Langer, director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s transportation program. “But synthetics also last so long that, in principle, they have the potential to save enough petroleum (by longevity) to perhaps equal that original effect.”

The quest for motor oil-driven efficiency gains has also prompted companies like Shell*, which sells more lubricants globally than any other, to push the envelope with less conventional lubricants. In collaboration with Formula One car designer Gordon Murray, Shell has created an ultra low viscosity concept lubricant that upped fuel economy by 6.5 percent during city condition driving tests in Murray’s T.25 urban concept car.

It may turn out that such quests for better fuel efficiency are where motor oil’s biggest environmental impacts will be made, particularly in light of lubricants’ relatively small share of total petroleum use. The U.S. DOE’s Energy Information Administration’s data show that while the United States consumed some 19.2 million barrels per day of petroleum in 2010, lubricants made up just 130,000 barrels—less than one percent.

But re-refining’s savings do add up over time, and the world’s total annual output of used motor oil is anything but trivial. That’s why, for many, a “closed-loop” system that puts the same oil back to work over and over again has such a strong appeal.

“If you’re concerned about the environment then by all means use re-refined oils,” said API’s Ferrick. “These oils are just fine for vehicles, as long as they are certified, and reusing something over and over again is always a good thing to do rather than wasting a valuable resource.”

This story is produced as part of National Geographic’s Great Energy Challenge initiative, which is sponsored by Shell. National Geographic maintains autonomy over editorial content.

 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/06/110601-green-motor-oil-recycling/

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Why Skunks Have Stripes: To Point to Fierce Anal Glands?

Skunks' stripes may have evolved to direct predators' attention to the animals' "weaponry" (file picture).

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

A skunk's stripes aren't just for style: They may direct predators' eyes straight to the source of the animal's smelly anal spray.
A new analysis of data on and pictures of nearly 200 carnivorous mammals—including skunks, badgers, and wolverines—shows that fierce fighters tend to be more boldly colored than more peaceable animals, which tend to use camouflage to stay safe.
And those colorations depend on the animals' methods of defense.
Creatures such as skunks, which have long stripes down their body, "tend to be really good at spraying their anal gland secretions—not just dribbling them out," said study leader Ted Stankowich, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Skunks are known to eject their offensive musk as far as about ten feet (three meters).
Other "species that are pretty good at [spraying]—they may not have pure stripes, but their blotches sort of form a stripe down the body."
(See "U.S. Military Is Seeking Ultimate 'Stink Bomb.'")
On the other end, badgers—which bite attackers—often have stripes by their mouths.
"We think these stripes may guide predators' attention to the source of danger," said Stankowich.
"If you're a badger and your mouth is the source of danger, that's what you want to advertise."
Bold Colors an Alternative to Stinky Spray?
Warning coloration is more typically found in insects, reptiles, and amphibians, such as poison dart frogs.
(See pictures: "Rainbow Hues of Amphibian 'Worms' Demystified.")
This nonconfrontational technique for thwarting predators is especially useful for skunks, which prefer not having to spray.
Spraying is "costly ... they're depleting a weapon, using ammunition that might be useful, and it advertises where they are," Stankowich said.
The stripe "strategy" has been a successful one for skunks throughout evolutionary time, Stankowich said, as the same striped pattern has independently evolved multiple times in skunks and related species across the globe.
(See pictures of animal patterns.)
The zorilla, for example, can spray like a skunk but lives in Africa and is more closely related to weasels than skunks. Yet its fur is striped just like a skunk's, leading the researchers to conclude that the stripes are a good predator deterrent—as is, of course, the ability to spray.
Like skunks, most other mamallian predators use anal gland secretions, but generally in smaller doses, to mark territory, Stankowich noted. (Humans and primates lack anal glands.)
Skunks and other sprayers, though—finding themselves with a surplus of musk—"may have co-opted it for use as a defense."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110602-skunks-anal-stripes-smell-science-mammals/

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Female Fish Develop "Testes" in Gulf Dead Zone

The Atlantic croaker (seen in a file picture) is a common Gulf fish.

A low-oxygen "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico (map) is causing sexual deformities in fish, a new study says.

The Gulf dead zone occurs when agricultural and waste runoff from the Mississippi River spark blooms of algae and microbes. These organisms gobble up oxygen, starving other marine life and creating huge swaths of "dead" ocean.

Between 2006 and 2007, nearly a quarter of female Atlantic croaker fish caught in the northern Gulf's dead zone had developed deformed, testes-like organs instead of ovaries.

(See "Sex-Changing Chemicals Found in Potomac River.")

It's unclear how long the fish were living in hypoxic—or low oxygen—waters before they began developing such sexual defects. But lab experiments showed that ten weeks of exposure is all that's needed.

The Gulf dead zone, which occurs annually, generally persists between May and September, and has more than doubled since the 1980s.

This zone, which often fluctuates in size, currently occupies a patch of ocean larger than the state of Connecticut. (Related: "Gulf of Mexico 'Dead Zone' Is Size of New Jersey [2005].")

Low Oxygen Screws Up Fish Hormones

Lab analysis of the fish revealed that the masculinized female croakers had decreased levels of a key chemical found in the brain and ovaries called aromatase.

This enzyme regulates the production of the female sex hormone estrogen, which is critical for proper development of the ovaries.

The brain uses about 20 percent of the oxygen that the croakers breathe, said study co-author M.S. Rahman, a marine biologist at the University of Texas in Austin's Marine Science Institute.

"If the oxygen levels go down, it affects the brain and the neurohormones and neuropeptides that it produces."

In croakers and many other fish species, the sex organs are male by default—estrogen exposure is required to transform the testes into ovaries.

Rahman and colleague Peter Thomas, also at the University of Texas, think that when the croaker's estrogen levels were reduced as a result of hypoxia, some of the cells in the animals' ovaries reverted back to testicular tissue.

(Also see "Mercury Poisoning Makes Birds Act Homosexual.")

The sex organs of the masculinized female fish were smaller and less developed than normal male testes. While some of malformed organs even contained sperm, they were incapable of fertilizing normal female eggs, Rahman said.

The study also found that male croakers were affected by hypoxia, although to a lesser degree. Males caught in the Gulf dead zone, as well as those bred in hypoxic lab conditions, had smaller than average testes and lower sperm counts, according to the study, published online recently in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Sexual impairments of both male and female croakers help explain the low hatching rates among fish exposed to dead zones, the scientists added.

While normal croaker hatching rates vary between about 40 to 80 percent, the hatching rate of the oxygen-starved fish was as low as 10 percent. What's more, affected females produced 1.5 times more male offspring than females.

Dead Zone Sex Changes to Impact Other Fish?

Scientists worry the reduced hatching rate and skewed sex ratio could lead to population changes that threaten croakers' long-term survival.

"The croaker is a very common fish, but it's not immune to crashing. So things like this skewed sex ratio can make a big difference," said Prosanta Chakrabarty, a fish biologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge who was not involved in the project.

There is little reason to think that other fish would not be similarly affected, Chakrabarty said. Indeed, apart from a slightly higher tolerance to low-oxygen conditions than other species, croakers are not unique compared with other Gulf fish.

"It's a pretty typical Gulf fish," Chakrabarty said. "I wouldn't be surprised if these findings could be generalized to any advanced bony fish."

Croakers belong to a family of fish that includes dozens of other species, including ones that are more commonly targeted for commercial fishing, such as spot.

"People eat croaker, but there are more important commercial fisheries in the Gulf," said Charles Jagoe, an environmental toxicologist at Florida A&M University.

"And if these conditions are interfering with fish reproduction, it could cause population declines and have an impact on fisheries resources and the economies of fishing communities," said Jagoe, who was also not involved in the study.

(Related: "Sex-Changing Chemicals Can Wipe Out Fish, Study Shows.")

But study co-author Rahman said it's too soon to tell whether his team's findings can be extrapolated to other Gulf fish species. "We didn't study other species, so we're not sure," he said.

Gulf Fish Hit by "Double Whammy"

Jagoe said the new findings suggest Gulf fish suffer from a human-caused "double whammy."

"The Mississippi is a drainage for a third of the country, and there's all kinds of sewage-treatment plants and factories discharging chemicals into the river ... and some of these interfere with fish reproduction," he said.

"And now we've got this second factor, where low dissolved oxygen caused by nutrient loading from sewage-treatment plants and agriculture is apparently capable of causing reproductive effects in fish as well."

Scientists are also concerned that the 2010 Gulf oil spill created dead zone-like conditions as microbes expanded in number to feed on the plentiful oil and gas. (Read more about the Gulf oil spill a year later.)

Study co-author Rahman said his team is currently putting together a proposal to study this very question.

(Also see "Massive Fish Kill in Gulf Caused by 'Dead Zone,' Oil?")

But Florida A&M's Jagoe suspects that any hypoxic conditions created by the Gulf oil spill would likely have been temporary, lasting no longer than the annual dead zone.

 

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