A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [123]
“And once or twice a day, twenty to sixty miles out, I saw isolated large shrimp swimming on the surface. Not near a weed line or near any protection. And also blue crabs, way offshore on the surface. I’ve never seen shrimp on the surface, and I’ve never seen blue crabs so far offshore. These were not small shrimp; I could see them from the wheelhouse, clearly alive, snapping their tails for locomotion. No other shrimp with them and no shelter, so what they were doing there, I’ve got no idea. I’ve seen this about a dozen times in the last ten days. I saw no sign of obvious distress. They were just very much out of place. What to attribute it to, I don’t know. Except we’ve had this enormous event, and then you see behavior you’ve never seen before.
“And I could count on one hand how many flyingfish I’ve seen. That’s extraordinary; I’m used to seeing them everywhere. They’ve got to be one of the more vulnerable animals to the oil.
“The dolphins, they’re there, but I have seen, I’d guess, less than a third of what I’d expect, and other than that one enormous herd I saw the day before they dropped dispersants near us, they’re pretty scarce and the groups are smaller. They seem more common to the east, away from the leak site. I haven’t seen a lot of seabird activity except farther east near Pensacola, where the little tunny are. And I only saw this once, but the action was fast and furious: two or three spinner sharks leaping out after prey—spectacular—with multiple twists before they splashed down.”
When I ask if he’s going back out, he tells me he’s not sure. “I don’t know if they’re going to keep us on the job much longer,” he says. “We’re not doing anything. It’s just wasteful to keep us on the payroll. They should just give the fishermen the money instead of paying us to run in circles.”
There’s a pause on the line—it’s not like him to stay quiet long—and then he adds this coda: “I can honestly say I have spent the whole summer doing absolutely nothing productive at all, and burning an enormous amount of fuel in the process. We just put a lot of miles and a lot of hours on the boat, for absolutely nothing. We accomplished no work, helped no one, produced no seafood, saved no lives, nothing. The only thing I have from all this is, at least I got to see it.”
On August 10, NOAA reopens federal waters off a portion of the Florida Panhandle. The modification applies to fish only. No crabs. No shrimp.
Fraud alert: BP discovers that the numbers of commercial fishing licenses sold since April is up by 60 percent compared with last year. Fishing was closed. “There was an approach by two individuals asking me to sign that they had worked for me, that they had been deckhands for me,” says one boat captain. “I had never seen these two individuals before in my life.” One guy charged with filing false public records and theft by fraud faces possible prison time, large fines, and even hard labor if convicted. But like dead birds, for every one you find, there could be ten out there.
Legal alert: BP is prepping for its rootin’ tootin’ rodeo of legal wrangling. University of South Alabama’s Bob Shipp says BP’s lawyers tried to hire his whole Department of Marine Sciences to do research for them. “They wanted the oversight authority to keep us from publishing things if, for whatever reason, they didn’t want them to be published,” Shipp says. “People were to be muzzled as part of the contract. It’s not something we could live with.”
Tulane law professor Mark Davis reminds us that BP is doing what other oil, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies have done in the past: hiring scientists to do research they want kept secret. “When the best scientists have evidence that would work against you, but they’re not able to present it to the public, well then, you’ve essentially bought some silence.”
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