They may look like something that cheerleaders hold while on the sidelines of a football game, but snare sentinels are the latest tools in monitoring the oil in local waterways.

A snare sentinel is a string of absorbent pom-poms anchored by a weight and suspended vertically in the water by a buoy.

They are used to detect submerged oil The sentinels are all approximately five to 15 feet long with different rows of the pom-pom material attached to locate oil at different levels.

Chelsea Murphy, staff scientist for Entrix, an environmental consulting firm hired to monitor and assess the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill, acknowledged, “there is a big public fear that there is an underwater oil monsters that will resurface during a storm event.”

However, she said, data that has been collected through this project and Entrix’s other monitoring efforts, does not support that concern.

Nearly 300 snare sentinels have been placed in the waters just miles off the Louisiana coastline.

There are 11 two-mile long groups with a snare located approximately every half mile in Lake Pontchartrain.

The snares are checked every 24 to 72 hours for evidence of oil residue, and so far since the project began last month, only 3 percent have indicated evidence of oil underwater.

None of that oil has been detected on the snares that have been placed out in the lake.

Daily, crews, which are made up of individuals who hold college degrees in a science field and local boat captains, go to the sites of the snares, pull them up and check for oil residue.

There are two crews working in the area of St. Tammany Parish, one assigned to the lake and another assigned to the Rigolets. They can each check approximately 40 each day.

The snares are designed to capture submerged oil. All of the oil that has been detected by the snares has been “heavily weathered,” meaning it has been on shore and has washed back out into the water.

When oil is detected on the snares, they are clipped and sent to the lab, where it is analyzed and documented. The people doing the sampling are independent from BP

The snares are placed as close to the shoreline as possible to determine how much oil if any is washing back off the shore.

“We want to make sure the oil is not remobilizing,” Murphy said. Every snare that is pulled from the water is documented on whether or not it has oil on it, because, Murphy said that data that shows where the oil is not is as important as the data that shows where the oil is.

Before the shrimp boats began their season this past week, Murphy said shrimper tied snares to their trawls and accompanied crews to determine if there was oil in their shrimping areas. Less than a thimbleful of oil was detected.

While the snare detects the oil that is submerged under the surface of the water, Gary Ott with NOAA said crews are using oysters to make sure there is no oil sinking to the bottom of the gulf. No oysters have tested positive for oil.

Murphy said while the monitoring, especially in the lake, continues to show up very little to no oil, her company continues to use items such as the snare sentinels to keep track of where the oil is.

“We are actively searching for it,” she said.