Pathfinder
Editor, Senior Moderator
Low seafood catches remain a mystery
By Cara Bayles
Staff Writer
Published: Sunday, April 15, 2012 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, April 15, 2012 at 1:15 a.m.
...
Porter said he collected oysters from Breton Sound in September 2011, shucked them and put them under a UV light that was set to pick up on certain hydrocarbons.
?The discussion was how come there?s mortality in the oysters,? he said.
?They fluoresced the same color a fresh tar ball did.?
Porter then sent the samples to a laboratory. The results indicated the oysters? tissue contained 200 parts per million of total petroleum hydrocarbons and 31 parts per million of diesel.
?That is significant in the oysters,? said Porter, ?so the question is anyone looking at the crabs and the shrimp this way??
Scott Killian, who works with Porter at EcoRigs, cited another unpublished study they have conducted, analyzing 250 data points over nine months starting in May 2010.
?We did some sampling of shrimp and other ground fish with trawler nets in Barataria Bay and found high levels of total petroleum hydrocarbons in marine organisms,? said Killian, who began working in the Gulf of Mexico as a commercial fisherman in 1981 and then became a research scientist studying the area in 1997. ?I have never seen anything like what I?ve seen since the BP oil spill. This is not par for the course.?
...
Julie Anderson, an assistant professor at the LSU Agcenter and Louisiana Sea Grant, has done research on the effect of oil and dispersants on local crabs.
For one study, she exposed larval blue crabs to chemical dispersants used to clean up the oil spill. But she exposed the crabs to a much higher concentration of dispersants than what was used in the Gulf oil spill.
Anderson said she found it did not make much of a difference in the crabs? death rate.
But when she exposed mud crabs to a combination of both oil and dispersant, the oil broke down more easily and was absorbed by the crabs.
More of them died as a result.
?From my experiments, I would say it?s not the dispersant alone,? she said. ?We did find that the dispersant made the oil more toxic because it brought it into the water instead of just keeping to the surface of the water.?
...
Full text:
http://www.dailycomet.com/article/2...14?Title=Low-seafood-catches-remain-a-mystery
By Cara Bayles
Staff Writer
Published: Sunday, April 15, 2012 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, April 15, 2012 at 1:15 a.m.
...
Porter said he collected oysters from Breton Sound in September 2011, shucked them and put them under a UV light that was set to pick up on certain hydrocarbons.
?The discussion was how come there?s mortality in the oysters,? he said.
?They fluoresced the same color a fresh tar ball did.?
Porter then sent the samples to a laboratory. The results indicated the oysters? tissue contained 200 parts per million of total petroleum hydrocarbons and 31 parts per million of diesel.
?That is significant in the oysters,? said Porter, ?so the question is anyone looking at the crabs and the shrimp this way??
Scott Killian, who works with Porter at EcoRigs, cited another unpublished study they have conducted, analyzing 250 data points over nine months starting in May 2010.
?We did some sampling of shrimp and other ground fish with trawler nets in Barataria Bay and found high levels of total petroleum hydrocarbons in marine organisms,? said Killian, who began working in the Gulf of Mexico as a commercial fisherman in 1981 and then became a research scientist studying the area in 1997. ?I have never seen anything like what I?ve seen since the BP oil spill. This is not par for the course.?
...
Julie Anderson, an assistant professor at the LSU Agcenter and Louisiana Sea Grant, has done research on the effect of oil and dispersants on local crabs.
For one study, she exposed larval blue crabs to chemical dispersants used to clean up the oil spill. But she exposed the crabs to a much higher concentration of dispersants than what was used in the Gulf oil spill.
Anderson said she found it did not make much of a difference in the crabs? death rate.
But when she exposed mud crabs to a combination of both oil and dispersant, the oil broke down more easily and was absorbed by the crabs.
More of them died as a result.
?From my experiments, I would say it?s not the dispersant alone,? she said. ?We did find that the dispersant made the oil more toxic because it brought it into the water instead of just keeping to the surface of the water.?
...
Full text:
http://www.dailycomet.com/article/2...14?Title=Low-seafood-catches-remain-a-mystery