Last week, I told you about how Louisiana approved oil-fouled seafood based on a simple “smell test”. State officials opened some waters to allow fisherman to start hooking redfish and trout, and will allow shrimping season to open next week based on the ability to sniff out oil and dispersant in the catch.

As far as eating the gulf seafood, let's just say the “smell test” didn't give me much confidence. But the latest tragedy out of the Gulf proves you don't need a keen sniffer to detect oil in your seafood – you can see it with your own two eyes!

Visible oil specks have been found in the larvae of the blue crab, a species near and dear to me as a Baltimorian.

In Baltimore, eating blue crab is a summertime rite of passage. A few dozen steamed crabs, caked in Old Bay seasoning and accompanied by a case or two of Natty Boh – B'More's swill of choice – is heaven on the harbor. (In the time-consuming process of cracking these crustaceans limb from limb, the beer goes a long way...)

We had a mighty crab feast in the Green Chip Living offices last week, and I was actually surprised to see that the crabs were from Maryland. We've had to cut back on our local crab consumption due to pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay over the years. When I ate crabs last summer, the bushel came from – you guessed it – the Gulf.

Now the crab population in the Gulf could be in serious danger.

"In my 42 years of studying crabs I've never seen this," Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi, told the AP.

Scientists have found oil in crab larvae all across the Gulf coast, which indicates the crude has begun working its way into the food web. In some areas, 100% of the larvae contained oil droplets.

Some scientists have contended that the oil dispersant used by BP may be breaking the oil into droplets small enough to infiltrate creatures like that have a shell, like crabs and shrimp.

The gulf has a delicate food web, as Green Chip Living wrote about earlier this month.

What's worrisome is that crabs reproduce around this time of the year, which obviously put them at greater risk. If these larvae are tainted with oil and dispersant, their ability to reproduce would be hampered.

"I think they should be more concerned that we might be losing whole cohorts of these animals when they're very small, and we won't see the impact in the adults but three or four years from now," noted Dr. Martin O'Connell from the University of New Orleans.

But the crab population isn't the only thing in danger...

"So many things feed on larvae, that's the disturbing part," Darryl Felder of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette told Science Magazine. He also said it was premature to predict what larger effects the oil may have on the ecosystem.



So while government and business officials are scrambling to convince the public that the leak has been plugged, the oil dissipated, and the seafood safe... findings like this are a stark reminder that serious damage may have already been done.



In any case, it looks like we'll be seeing less crabs next summer, which is a bummer, not only for the crabs and their predators, but for the fisherman that are used to netting $300 million annually from the trade.



If there is any encouraging news to take from this, it's that the larvae are still alive, despite the oil and dispersant pollution. We can only hope the ecosystem will bounce back and prove its resilience.



But only time will tell..



Be Well,

Jimmy





