Disease-ridden Fish, Eyeless Shrimp, Mutated Sea Life – Welcome to the Toxic Gulf of Mexico
Disease-ridden Fish, Eyeless Shrimp, Mutated Sea Life, and Fish Plagued with Oozing Lesions, Gashes, Parasites, Ulcers and Strange Black Stains.
Sounds like a bad science fiction film right?
Sadly, it’s no science fiction movie. It’s what scientists and commercial fisherman are increasingly pulling out of the Gulf of Mexico. From mutated sea life to diseased chemical-ridden fish, there are growing concerns over the long-term effects of the 2010 BP oil spill.
In an exclusive report from Al Jazeera English, a number of scientist are raising serious questions about how the chemicals released during the BP spill are effecting sea life in the Gulf of Mexico.
Two years after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, pouring untold amounts of oil into the ocean, the latest research suggests that the Gulf is still in serious trouble.
In testing out of the University of South Florida , researchers are finding oil in the bile extracted from fish.
“Bile tells you what a fish’s last meal was,” said Steve Murawski, a marine biologist with the University of South Florida who was chief science adviser for the National Marine Fisheries Service until November 2010 when he began working on oil spill studies for USF. “There was as late as August of last year an oil source out there that some of those animals were consuming. Those levels are indicative of polluted urban estuaries.”
But it’s not just oil they are finding.
According to the Al Jazeera report, fisherman are finding sea life with horrible mutations. One fisherman told them that they had caught over 400 pounds of eyeless shrimp. According to the fisherman “not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
Scientists are blaming some of these mutations on the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) that were used to clean up the oil that spewed into the gulf.
While BP and federal government agencies like the FDA and NOAA insist eating Gulf seafood is safe, no real efforts have been made to study the actual health effects in humans. I guess it really shouldn’t be surprising since these are that same agencies who refuse to test seafood effected by the nuclear disaster in Japan.
Over two million gallons of the dispersant Corexit were used by BP. These dispersant chemicals are highly toxic to not only sea life, but human life as well. If we are seeing these types of mutations in sea life, it’s only a matter of time before the effects make their way up the food chain.