Scientists said that a newly discovered bacteria, that has been in the gulf for ages is consuming plumes of oil in the Mexican Gulf.

A new scientific study said that the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico was ready for something like the Deepwater Horizon blowout to happen.

Experts said that the petroleum-eating bacteria, which had feasted for ages on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor, vastly reproduced in the cloud of oil that went underwater for months after the April 20 incident. Not only that they had beaten fellow microbes in numbers, the bacteria each raised their metabolism to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.

The result was almost unbelievable, a nature-made cleanup crew of bacteria that are capable of reducing the amount of oil in the undersea cloud by half every three days, according to the research published online by the Journal Science, Tuesday.

The findings of a team of scientists led by Terry C. Hazen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, help explained one of the biggest mysteries, “Where has all the oil gone?”.

“What we know about the degradation rates fits with what we are seeing in the last three weeks,” Hazen said. “We’ve gone out to the sites, and we don’t find any oil, but we do find the bacteria.”

Alan Mearns, a senior staff scientist in the emergency response of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, called the new Berkeley team study “critical to the understanding of the fate of what remains in the Gulf. This study shows that microbes are quickly degrading some components of subsurface oil found in the deep ocean without creating hazardous dead zones.”

Two weeks after the well was plugged, federal scientists argued that half of the oil was gone from the water and the rest was disappearing. The claim looked unreasonably good to many experts.

However, Hazen’s calculation of how fast the bacteria consumed the oil, combined with his recent findings that oil is absent in deep gulf waters, supports the credibility of all those findings.

“We were all right,” he said.

The researchers continued collecting deep-water samples finding plumes aged two weeks after the well was plugged. However, the team cannot find plumes that are from the past three weeks