/ Rob Beschizza / 8:00 am Wed Apr 18, 2012

Gulf seafood "horribly deformed"

Eyeless shrimp. Fish afflicted by sores. Crabs without claws or hard shells. Bizarre deformities are becoming common in seafood from the Gulf, according to Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, and pollution caused by the 2010 BP oil spill is the likely cause.

Al Jazeera's Dahr Jamail:

The [oil] dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP's disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic - able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus - and carcinogenic.

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists [Al Jazeera]

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    2. I wonder how conservatives are going to try and spin this one?  We’ve already been told by right wingers that the spill was no big deal and all us whiney progressives were simply uneducated on the issue.

        1. I forgot, eating seafood is one step away from being a dreaded vegetarian… and that’s a gateway to worse things like being a vegan… and next thing you know you’re a homosexual drug addict who hates Reagan and rapes children… and then (dare I say the word) you might become a (gasp) atheist or agnostic or something else evil and non-Christian.

          It all starts with the shrimp.

        2. I like those core right wingers. Eating red meat increases the chances of having cancer. I try to stay away from the seafood from the Gulf coast. 

        1. Yeah, if they can sweep it under the toxic rug, they’ll certainly try. I guess it’s up to the rest of us (who aren’t far right wing) to spread the facts (like usual).

      3. Easy.  

        Show me a shrimp from anywhere that doesn’t already look “horribly deformed”, you can’t cause it’s a weird looking creature.  A weird looking tasty creature, just the way god made ’em.  It’s the ugly that makes them so scrumptious.  Have you tasted one of the new shrimp, one of the modern shrimp, one of the uglier and therefore tastier shrimp?   No, of course not cause the liberals won’t let you try one, worried about animal rights and toxins and so on.    If the nanny state would just let the American People take responsibility for themselves and their own risk taking, then the free market could start selling 21st century shrimp and the gulf seafood industry would not only be back on its feet, but also adding jobs at a critical time.  “Critical time” being anytime during the job-hating presidency of Obama.

        oh, I’m a little disturbed at how easy that was.

        2.  That’s right, let’s turn everything into an experiment. Who needs those food regulations, if you don’t die from botulism than it’s safe to eat if you do die then you stop buying and the company goes bankrupt, hyuck, hyuck.
          Who needs surgeons licences, if the surgeon kills all their patients, then he has none and goes bankrupt, hyuck, hycuk.
          Pilots licence, don’t need that regulation, taking off is easy landing, well if they crash, problem solved no more pilot, hyuck, hyuck.
          Let the free market sort itself out, there are plenty of men, women and children to try and die, why bother with regulations they just suck up God ordained profits.
          If the moron state would only just eat shit and die, oh wait, they are doing that as we speak.

    1. If ya won’t spend the money to clean it and/or properly regulate it, simply downplay it.  Seems to do the trick on people without proper critical thinking skills (a.k.a. many Americans).

      1. We live in a system that rewards non-critical thinking. So it’s not a big surprise that a journalist looking for ‘experts’ will end up interviewing so-called scientists (I’d prefer to call them scientific workers) whose grasp of the complexity of the marine ecosystem is well, shallow. The birds, turtles and so on that were washed ashore dead during this spill were comparably few and comparably little oil reached the beaches and marshes. So the ‘experts’ working in their niche say: “Hey it wasn’t as bad as we feared”…

        Meanwhile the biggest, deepest oil spill in US history though plugged probably continues to poison the very base of the complex marine food chain with that really diverse cocktail of toxic hydrocarbons. Hey and let’s not forget the tons and tons of dispersing agents. All these chemicals continue to react in unforeseen ways inside and outside organisms.

        And after all we know more about the moon than we know about the deep ocean. Now, oopsie, we’re seeing these deformed creatures, so now the contamination has arrived in the middle of the food chain… Clearly the picture painted by many of the so-called experts is very incomplete. The harm done by this spill could be unprecedented and we wouldn’t know about it.

        That’s why it’s so irresponsible to go drilling in the deep ocean in the first place. The big corporations like BP don’t give a shit about the ecology and their world view is not informed by science but the only thing that matters to them – the bottom line. And that’s true for almost every other aspect of our economy. Ecological disaster looms while we have hardly begun to understand life, the oceans and the climate of this planet.

        If we can’t correct that we humans truly are the cancer of this planet.

        1. Agreed, and protecting the environment is certainly similar to contraception in a way as well. Can’t have that, either.

          My God, we’re surrounded by baboons!

        2.  Those deformed critters — another sign that the end is near! So no sense in protecting the environment anyway.

          1. Between hating on evolution, the environment, science in general and Gawd’s planned apocalypse making everything but Bible study useless… we just can’t win with these people, I guess..

      1. Dude, they’re not mutants, they’re from outer space now… 
        Didn’t you get Michael Bay’s memo? He personally leaves one after sodomizing the childhood of each fan.

  8. Those dispersants must be pretty nasty if they can detect their effect apart from the rest of the toxic sludge stream, I mean Mississippi River, that we pump in there.

    1. Industrial solvents, drilling fluids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – the works! In never before seen amounts! I wouldn’t be surprised if this stuff could turn Bambi’s offspring into Alien.

    1. Right, and what about things going on internally we can’t see?  I wonder how healthy it’s been eating this seafood that doesn’t show outward deformities but are affected internally?

      1.  Well, I just said the other day I could use another arm or two… (Besides it’s probably all God’s will or something.)

    1. It has an Arab name! how terrifying! not at all like unbiased news sources such as Fox News, CNN, or the BBC!

    2.  Exactly! It’s not like they’re a legitimate and respected global news network that won the 2012 Peabody Award, or  News Channel of the Year at the Royal Television Society Awards (beating BBC and Sky News)….oh, wait.

        1.  Did you even read that article? It’s full of misspellings, atrocities against grammar, and uses (as its only 2 sources) a Chinese TV network and an Iranian one. Because *that’s* a reliable news…blog.

          1.  Yeah, I’m not happy with that blog at all. Unfortunately it was the best English-language source I could find.

  12. I ate some gulf prawns the other day, and they were delicious.  No deformities that I could find. I wonder what’s growing inside me.

  15. Cthulhu called, he said “stop adding tentacles, eyes, and unspeakable organs to things that are horrible enough”.

    Later, the elder god added “That´s Shub-niggurath job”.

    The fungi from Yuggoth could not be reached for comments.

  17. Boing boing central, please put Godzilla on standby. We may need his help with giant shrimps.

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