The next time you sidle up to the table to enjoy some fresh Gulf sea creatures, consider this: You might be digesting something has never before been seen in these waters. Or, actually, can’t see at all since it no longer has eyes. It used to, but no more.
No worries, folks.
The sea fish are safe, they’re just bumping into each other now.
On the two year anniversary of the great BP oil disaster, the Gulf is still producing a catch. It’s a smaller creepier one, but it’s still going to appear on your dinner plate coated in cornmeal breading and sprinkled with lemon juice.
NOAA and the FDA test these little suckers like crazy and — so far — you can eat ‘em. They’re safe. You just might not wanna look at ‘em in the wild.
The issue here is that fisherpeople are seeing things — eyeless shrimp, lesions on fish, crabs with no claws, shellfish being eaten from the inside out — that they’ve never, ever, never seen before.
According to this Al Jazeera piece, the Gulf sounds more like the Island of Dr. Moreau than a healthy body of water.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.
Said one LSU researcher who has proven a direct link to the spill with some of the malformed creatures that live in the Gulf: “I’m worried about the entire seafood industry of the Gulf being on the way out.”
Sobering, but at least there have been no “Hitler fish” sightings. Yet.
[via Al Jazeera]
THESE ARE NORMAL
- Congratulations ladies of Louisiana, you earn 67 cents for every dollar your man makes.
- Hot sauce?
- “That amount, when adjusted for inflation, is actually lower than what a minimum-wage worker earned in 1968 and is too meager to offer anyone the chance to climb out of poverty, let alone afford basic goods and services.”
- Ted Nugent: PATRIOT!
- Todays Darwin Award winner.
- Is this the end?