Oil platforms off California’s coast have long been controversial. Some residents consider them a blight and worry about the potential for environmental disaster, like the Gulf of Mexico’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. But according to a report by researchers at Occidental College and the University of California, Santa Barbara, fish love them.

The scientists found that on average, the artificial structures are home to 27 times as many fish as natural rocky reefs in the area. “We spent well over a decade and a half studying dozens of natural reefs and 16 oil platforms — some close to shore and some farther away,” says Milton Love, a UCSB professor, research biologist and a co-author of the study. “We covered a lot of territory, and found that rockfish tend to dominate on the platforms.”

California coastal waters are home to 60 species of rockfish, which like the ocean floor. Juveniles are found in shallower water, and the oil platforms’ structure shelters them from predators.

“The platforms serve as MPAs,” says Love. “They are nursery grounds for larger fish — particularly rockfish. Juvenile rockfish are drifting around in plankton, looking for a place to settle. These are very tall structures. Normal rocky reefs are vertically challenged — they don’t extend up into the water column hundreds of feet the way these platforms do.”

The findings are expected to contribute to the debate as to what should happen when the thousands of offshore oil and gas platforms around the world are decommissioned.

“Rather than completely removing the structures, underwater portions could be left intact to provide habitat to supplement increasingly threatened fish populations on natural reefs,”researchers wrote in the study.

As for Love, he sympathizes with people who hate looking at oil platforms, but he also understands the consequences of destroying them.

“It’s a thin wire I walk,” says Love. “My purely personal view is that I think it’s immoral to kill huge amounts of animals. Why would we want to blow them up? A decent compromise would be to remove the visible parts, without using explosives. You’d still have a great deal of the jacket remaining, so you don’t kill all of the organisms.”

For an in-depth, entertaining resource on 490 species of Pacific coastal fish (about the longhorn fangtooth: “An idiosyncratic species with a head that looks like Gaia — after [consuming] a nearly infinite amount of beer — went about hitting it with a ball-peen hammer”), order Milton Love’s Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast.

For more on marine conservation:

20 New Protected Species | Marine Conservation Photography Tips | Cambodia's First Marine Protected Area