“One oyster filters up to 50 gallons of water a day — with nowhere to hide they are left to choke on BPs toxic sludge. And whatever oysters do survive will poison the entire ocean food chain as both oil and dispersant contaminants concentrate in their tissues and are passed onto larger marine species.”
NOAA International Research Facility comes to Newport, Oregon
What’s disturbing, of course, is that if you substituted “gushed” for “burned up,” you could play a similar thought experiment again — basically fast-forwarding from the unabated seabed oil gusher to a time when extraction of oil from the earth’s deepest and most remote deposits no longer keeps up with rising global demand (energy forecasters foresee several decades of rising demand even as rich countries’ use of the fuel flattens and perhaps declines).
here.
“The intensifying trade in bluefin may soon empty the waters of this master of the sea.
In just the last 35 years, exploding markets for sushi-grade tuna, combined with intensifying industrial-scale hunts aided by satellites and spotters in airplanes, have devastated not only the fish but also many fisheries.
Dozens of Mediterranean towns that maintained coastal net traps for half a millennium or more are turning away from now-barren waters. Anglers off New England, who once watched great parading schools of bluefin migrate north at the end of each summer now scour the seas for scattered fish. Most vulnerable, by far, marine biologists say, is the apparently distinct population of bluefin tuna that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico.
The threat to the bluefin was underscored last week by researchers who have tracked hundreds of the fish on their ocean-spanning journeys using electronic tags. They found that the tuna that spawn in the west, which are most severely depleted, are further threatened by an ever-broadening gantlet of hooks, seines, harpoons, traps and now farm-style pens, in which netted fish are raised and fattened - all to supply the Japanese sushi trade.”
