In 2010, however, researchers found soft corals that had apparently been killed by dispersed oil from the spill3. At the conference, Charles Fisher, a deep-sea biologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, reported that the spill damaged at least one deep coral stand and possibly two more. His collaborators are also reporting substantial losses of sea-floor animals, such as worms, downstream of the spill. And in shipboard tests, Erik Cordes of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who collaborates with Fisher, showed that an oil–dispersant mixture is highly toxic to deep-sea soft corals, which can take hundreds of years to grow.