Time to take seafood off the menu:
Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.
Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them “in almost all” of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. — more than 300 miles of coastline — said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon
“It does appear that there is a Corexit sort of fingerprint in the blob samples that we ran,” Erin Gray, a Tulane biologist, told the Huffington Post Thursday. Two independent tests are being run to confirm those findings, “so don’t say that we’re 100 percent sure yet,” Gray said.
Hoocoodanode!
freeulysses
Light sweet crab?
Punchy
Here comes the $400 billion dollar lawsuit against the makers of Corexit.
Face
Since it never leaves the food chain, maybe they should rename that shit “Noexit”
trueblood
Give it a couple (million) years, this shit tends to work itself out.
Dick Woodcock
I would love to see a meal of the tasty “Light sweet crab” offered up to jackholes like Rush Limbaugh. He said that the oil spill was no big deal; let’s see him put his money where his mouth is and enjoy this healthy meal.
gnomedad
Clearly these researchers made this up because they hate freedom and want to destroy jobs.
MattF
…and crawfish too, I suppose. So much for “pinch the tail and suck the head.”
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Certainly not Paul L. The oil disappearing from the surface was all he needed to declare it safe yesterday.
Violet
I want Rush Limbaugh to sit down to a big plate of Gulf seafood taken from areas directly affected by the oil spill. Dig in, Rush. Enjoy.
mnpundit
If only Obama’s buddy Ken Salazar gave a fuck about enforcing laws on the books, we could have prevented this entire disaster.
Jay in Oregon
I’m waiting for the brave souls behind the “Burn a Koran” stunt to declare they’re holding a Gulf Coast Surf and Turf to prove that this while thing is an eeeevul librul hoax.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
I think if we label the product Sweet Republican Unregulated Oil Industry Seafood(c), the Free Market(tm) will find a market for it, and the whole problem takes care of itself.
Republican cats will surely eat it even if people won’t.
So what’s the big whoop? Are Democrats deliberately stirring up fear in order to punish the red states?
Shalimar
So, basically, all the seafood in the gulf is now poisoned not by the oil, but by the shit they used to cover up the oil so black beaches wouldn’t hurt their PR efforts. Evil bastards.
@Punchy: Wouldn’t that be BP? I remember reading that they used Corexit mainly because one of their subsidiaries makes it.
Fergus Wooster
@Violet:
Visions of Mr. Burns and the three-eyed fish.
geemoney
It’s in the stinking name of the class of compounds used. They’re called dispersants, not removants. They are designed to make things deagglomerate and smaller than you can see. The s#it they disperse doesn’t actually go anywhere, it just makes it harder to see and basically impossible to clean up. The better idea, if such a technology existed for crude oil, would have been to use a flocculant. Corexit just made the spilled oil akin to radon, where hey, if we can’t see it, there’s no problem, right? Look at how clear that water is now!
burnspbesq
@geemoney:
I don’t think that’s quite right. I thought the idea behind dispersants was to break the oil into bite-size pieces that could be dealt with by the combination of sunlight, wave action, and naturally occurring bacteria. It’s not a pure hide-the-ball exercise.
Buckethead
@burnspbesq:
That is the purpose of dispersants, but that’s not how BP used them in this spill. They were mostly injecting them directly into the stream of oil as it came out of the broken well, a mile deep in the ocean. The effect of that is that the droplets never show up on the surface, where sunlight and bacteria can deal with them. They stay down below. The reason they used dispersants was to hide the size of the spill, so that the fine they eventually have to pay (which is a certain number of dollars multiplied by the number of barrels spilled) is lower, and also to hide the true size of the spill from cameras.
mac
…and just maybe to prevent the oil from coating marshland?
JScott
If you have the room, put in a pond and raise tilapia.
I have to go out to the garden now; I can’t cope with the fucked-up-edness.
geemoney
@burnspbesq: In addition to what Buckethead said, the main mechanism for the dispersants is to make the dispersed compounds water soluble. Once you do that, you’ve removed the drive for the oils to go to the surface; it will do so eventually but you make the oil fairly “happy” in water. The point being that while theoretically you can get UV and bacteria to degrade the oil, the fraction of the oil that is on the surface is radically decreased, and those mechanisms don’t operate for most of the oil in the water. I really do see it as an out of sight, out of mind thing.
Mac-
All that it did was shift where the ecological disaster would take place. We’ve been treating the ocean as a toilet for a long time, though, so it’s just par for the course.
Elie
@Shalimar:
I am not sure that Coexit was used to keep the beaches looking nice. Are you?
From TheOilDrum.com, My understanding of the need to use this noxious and risky was to break down the oil from this deep water oil catastrophe both 1) before it reached the surface where much of the most at risk marine life exists and 2) to aid the breakdown of this very dense, viscous oil, being exuded in huge amounts, by the bacteria. 3) while toxic to marine life for a period, it IS biodegradable, the extent to which of course, is not perfectly known, but that entered into the decision to use it.
There is no doubt that it will have consequences. So would have the unmitigated oil washing on shore and also effecting marine life. It is not intellectually honest to pose this as though not using Coexit or something like it would not have resulted in bad consequences…
This is and was a horrible situation that has nothing but bad and catastrophic effects that will take years to even measure, much less rectify. But lets be honest about that and stop pretending that for every treatment of this horror that has negative effects, the lack of treatment would not result in a rosey outcome. We were fucked on day one no matter what. Alls we could do as a nation, government and the oil companies is to try to make our best efforts to fix things. Hopefull, we will also get the courage to do what is necessary to prevent this sort of horror in the future — but I am not holding my breath on that…
PaminBB
The only reason BP dumped all that shit into the gulf was because they thought it would make economic sense – for them. No other motive makes sense.
HyperIon
@Dick Woodcock:
Blinky as Fergus mentions.
Also it sounds like someone is using pattern recognition to determine “the signature for Corexit”. Cool.
geemoney
@HyperIon: They’re only really talking about spectrum matching. You just superimpose two different IR spectra and look at the difference plot. It’s not as cool as it sounds. There’s other garbage in the fingerprint region of the spectra, but I imagine that the crude oil would muddy that region quite a bit, so to speak. With good controls, you can probably model things pretty well to get reasonable confidence on the identity of Corexit. There are other analytical techniques that I would think are more definitive.
Zach
The Feds should set up an alternative “buyer beware” crab market instead of letting these guys live and die. Weighing the pros and cons, I’d eat some blue crabs that encountered a small amount of dispersant if the price were right.
Also, if those larvae live, they won’t be adults (and eaten) until a year or so from now.
The idea that dispersants are only being used to hide the problem is ridiculous. The EPA’s been studying this issue closely since this began, and has consistently come down on the side of using dispersants, which are proven to speed up oil decay, have not been shown to bioaccumulate, and are less toxic than oil. Yes, they don’t make oil disappear; the point is to distribute it throughout the entire water column rather than exist in a highly concentrated form at the surface… ie those low concentration oil plumes that everyone’s worried about are the intended result and a (relatively) good thing.