Baby snapper are everywhere.

So are baby trout, grouper and grunt. Early results from an annual count of juvenile fish in grass beds scattered around the northern Gulf of Mexico suggest that the larvae of some species survived the oil spill in large numbers, according to the scientists involved.

“My preliminary assessment, it looks good, it looks like we dodged a bullet. In terms of the numbers of baby snapper and other species present in the grass beds, things look right,” said Joel Fodrie, a researcher with the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science who has been studying seagrass meadows along the coast for five years.

His group has sampled aquatic life in grass beds in Alabama, Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle. The group will sample around Louisiana’s Chandeleur Islands this fall.

At the height of the spill, when millions of gallons of oil were floating on the surface, scientists said that one of the critical questions for the health of the Gulf was whether the trillions of larvae hatched offshore each spring could survive the pollution.

The larvae are the young of most everything that swims in the Gulf, from crabs and shrimp to fishes great and small.

The tiny creatures drift on ocean currents for weeks before settling in various habitats — including seagrass meadows, oysters reefs and fields of floating sargassum far offshore — depending on the species.

Fodrie’s survey provides one of the first measures of how many larvae survived, although his findings apply only to the species that settle in grass beds.

“Grand Bay looks like Grand Bay in terms of the number of juvenile fish,” he said. “Petit Bois Island looks like Petit Bois looks every year. The Dauphin Island grass beds look like Dauphin Island. The most unusual thing we are seeing are the incredible numbers of young speckled trout.”

During a day of sampling in Grand Bay and Horn Island, Fodrie’s crew pulled a shrimp net modified with extra fine mesh over grass beds for two minutes at a time.

The net was hauled out, and Fodrie’s assistant, Chris Baillit, dumped the contents — mostly a big ball of various seagrasses and marine algae — onto a metal sorting table strapped to the deck of the boat.

As the grass was spread out, stingrays began to beat their wings against the table top, and spider crabs with long, spindly legs scuttled away from hands trying to grab them and toss them overboard. Croakers and pigfish — a small, delicious member of the grunt family — made an impressive racket as they were sorted and catalogued.

Most everything caught was counted and recorded. Megan Sabal, a Dauphin Island Sea Lab intern, said that she documented a total of 40 species in Grand Bay and around Horn and Petit Bois islands. There were 29 species caught around Horn Island alone.

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Throughout the day, few adult fish came aboard. But the tiny fish numbered in the thousands.

There were pinfish, pipefish, blowfish, starfish, stargazers, mahara, anchovies and white perch. The crabs included spider, grass, mud and blue. Buried in the grass and algae were thousands of amphipods — the bugs of the marine world — and shrimp smaller than a grain of rice.

But the stars of the show were the snapper and other gamefish. Tiny lane snapper, smaller than a house key, were mirror-perfect images of their much larger parents. It was the same with speckled trout, as small as an inch long.

Holding up a pair of mangrove snapper — one about 2 inches long, the other the size of a thumbnail — Fodrie estimated the larger was 2 months old and had probably been floating on the surface when the oil was at its thickest. The smaller fish, he said, was probably a matter of weeks old.

A gag grouper of around 9 inches was estimated to be 4 or 5 months old. It coughed up its most recent meal — two partially digested pipefish, several shrimp and a crab no bigger than the eraser on a pencil.

Fodrie’s studies shed no light on the status of red snapper, vermilion snapper or mackerel, whose young don’t gravitate to seagrass beds when they are juveniles.

“We can only talk about the young fish that colonize the grass beds,” he said, “but those species look like they are in good shape.”

Fodrie said, “We’ve seen more speckled trout in Grand Bay than we’ve ever seen anywhere else along the coast. There are literally millions of speckled trout in the water. The ones we’ve cut open have been eating a ton of shrimp. The snapper have been eating little worms, crustaceans, shrimp and even really small fish.”

At the end of a week of sampling, Fodrie said that damage from the oil spill was hard to detect among the tiny creatures that call the Gulf’s seagrass habitat home.

“We’ll have to watch these fish as they grow for mechanical damage to their bodies from the oil. But from the perspective of the numbers of fish present in the grass beds, things look good,” Fodrie said. “We’re used to catching 30 lane snapper in some tows, and we’ve been doing that this year.”