Scientists Find Oil Under Shells Of Larval Blue Crabs - Pelicans Cook Themselves Drying Oiled Wings

EW ORLEANS, United States, Jul 20, 2010 (IPS/IFEJ) - Shellfish in the Gulf of Mexico grow with drops of petroleum inside them, coyotes eat oil-soaked birds, and sharks suffocate when the oil coats their gills. Oil droplets have been found beneath the shells of tiny post-larval blue crabs drifting into Mississippi coastal marshes from offshore waters, says Harriet Perry, director of the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

Many kinds of fish and shore birds feed on those young crabs. And this is just one of the many examples of how the crude oil that began to spill Apr. 20 from British Petroleum's (PB) Deepwater Horizon well has already taken its toll on the Gulf's food chain. Henderson explained to this reporter that oil-soaked birds are being eaten by coyotes, which are then later eaten by alligators further inland.

"Do you know how the pelicans die of oil?" asked Dean Wilson, executive director of Atchafalaya Basinkeeper. "They open their wings, thinking they are drying them in the sun, and they just cook in the sun. Thousands of birds are dying like that because of the greed of a foreign company." The organisation Wilson heads is dedicated to preserving the ecosystems of the Atchafalaya Basin on the Louisiana Coast. He is incensed at the catastrophic impact the BP oil disaster, which has been ongoing for nearly three months.

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"This is the second most important delta in the Western Hemisphere and one of the most important deltas on the planet," said Paul Orr, an officer with Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper, a group focused on keeping the lower Mississippi River pollution-free. "We just have no idea what this amount of oil in this close proximity to the delta could do. The decision was made to use the dispersants intensively to sink the oil -- the rationale was to minimise shore impacts at all cost," he said. "But now it seems like the real reason they've been doing that is to get the oil to disappear because if it was staying on the surface, at least you could collect it, even if it starts impacting the shore in some way," said Orr.

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http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52214

:cry:
The death tolls are nowhere near finished

and big oil still owns us all, don't they?

a ffew millenia from now, to speculate about the Great Holocene Extinction.