A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [113]
You’d think anyone in the fish biz would be delighted at the openings, but some think it absurd to open fishing grounds so soon. Some fishermen and their families worry that if any seafood diners wind up with a tainted plate, it will be a knockout blow. “I wouldn’t feed that to my children without it being tested—properly tested, not these ‘Everything’s okay’ tests,” says a shrimp boat owner from Barataria, Louisiana. She and her husband are sufficiently skeptical of the government’s assurances that they will not go shrimping when the season opens, at least not initially. Gotta respect them for that.
For the owner of a Venice shrimp and crab processing dock, it’s the not knowing. “Will there even be a market for Louisiana seafood?” he wonders. “What is the impact on crabs and shrimp over the long haul? It’s impossible to know.”
In the short haul, part of the answer is possible to know. Keath Ladner’s Gulf Shores Sea Products has a steady customer who buys two million pounds of shrimp a year. They’ve canceled their entire order. “The sentiment in the country is that the seafood in the Gulf is tainted,” Ladner says. “People are scared of it right now.”
Dawn Nunez’s family is also in the shrimp business, but she dismisses the reopenings as premature, “nothing but a PR move. It’s going to take years to know what damage they’ve done,” she denounces. “It’s just killed us all.”
July 28 is day 100. Louisiana gets a new small oil spill just after midnight when a barge being pulled by a tugboat crashes into an inactive well in Barataria Bay, sending a mist of oil and gas a hundred feet into the air, creating a mile-long slick.
Two days later, a ruptured pipeline gushes as much as a million gallons of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, sending federal and state government officials scrambling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.
On July 30 Dr. Caz Taylor of Tulane University copies me on an e-mail saying, “We have been seeing droplets of what could be oil or dispersant (or both) in crab larvae, from Pensacola, FL, all the way down into Galveston, TX. We haven’t yet confirmed what these droplets are but if they are oil-spill related, then we have been seeing effects of the oil spill in places where oil is not visible for a while now. So the (welcome) news that the surface oil is receding does not greatly change my perception of the magnitude of the effects of the spill. There is still a lot of oil out there. If the oil and/or dispersant has entered the food web then the effects will be felt throughout the Gulf although they may take months, or longer, to manifest themselves.”
Here is what most people read in something like that: “We have been seeing droplets of oil and dispersant (both) in crab larvae from Florida to Texas. So we have been seeing effects of the oil spill even where oil is not visible. The (dubious) news that the surface oil is receding does not greatly change the magnitude of the effects. There is still a lot of oil out there. It has entered the food web and the effects will be felt throughout the Gulf for months, or longer.”
Here’s what a scientist reads: “We have been seeing droplets of what could be oil or dispersant in crab larvae, but we haven’t yet confirmed what these droplets are. If the oil and/or dispersant has entered the food web, then the effects may take months, or longer, to manifest themselves. That’s a big ‘if.’ ”
Here’s what the media actually writes and what most everyone reads: “University scientists have spotted the first indications oil is entering the Gulf seafood chain—in crab larvae—and one expert warns the effect on fisheries could last