“…Another characteristic of marine environments is that the vast majority of bacteria (90-99%) are uncultivable (Amann et al, 1995); hence, the analysis of microbial communities that contribute to in situ hydrocarbon biodegradation activities has been a challenge to microbiologists (Rollins & Colwell, 1986;Wilkinson 1988 Since the pioneering work on marine bacteria by C.E. ZoBell, many bacterial strains have been isolated from the coastal and oceanic environments; these bacteria, including the genera Alteromonas (Beckman et al, 2008;Ivanova et al, 2004), Aeromonas (Stabili & Cavallo 2004), Alcanovorax (Head et al, 2006;Purkrtova et al, 2010), Bacillus (Oguntoyinbo, 2006), Cycloclasticus (Kasai et al, 2002), Chromobacterium, Flavobacterium, Marinobacter spp., Shewanella (Holt et al, 2005), Microscilla (Lennon, 2007), Micrococcus (Süss et al, 2004), Rhodococcus (Süss et al, 2004), Photobacterium, Planacoccus, Pseudomonas, Pseudoalteromonas, and Vibrios, among other genera, have been considered to be representative of marine bacteria. Many of them have the capacity to use different hydrocarbons (Head et al, 2006, Yu et al, 2005a.…”