Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause. Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp - and interviewees' fingers point towards BP's oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP's oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: "Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets."
"Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico]," she added, "They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don't have their usual spikes... they look like they've been burned off by chemicals."
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."
... shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, eyeless shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, tumorous shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp with oiled gills, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that's about it.
They punched through into something worse than oil.
COREXIT ... which at first I kept reading as "core exit" which would surely let the magic smoke escape...
Sometimes crab shells are supposed to be soft, but ecch.
The "soft shell" crabs sold as food are actually ordinary hard-shelled crabs caught soon after molting, when the new shell hasn't hardened yet. Most crustaceans try to hide after a molt, since they're vulnerable for a while. However, some crab species in some habitats have predictable post-molt behaviors which allow fishermen to specifically catch "soft-shell" crab. (or something to that effect.)
These reports make it sound like fishermen are catching large numbers of soft shell crab when they wouldn't expect to -- presumably because the shells aren't ever hardening properly.
And this is how modern state-capitalism ruined seafood for me.
It would have been nice to live in a future where food wasn't poison. Oh well.
I still have a grandparent that asks me why I don't want kids.
Why are foot fetishists out fishing in the Gulf in the first place?