NEW ORLEANS – Eyeless shrimp, fish
with oozing sores and other mutant creatures found in the Gulf of Mexico
are raising concerns over lingering effects of the BP oil spill.
On April 20, 2010, an explosion aboard the BP-leased Deepwater
Horizon rig killed 11 people and spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels
into the Gulf, in the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
Two years later, scientists and commercial fishers alike are finding
shrimp, crab and fish that they believe have been deformed by the
chemicals unleashed in the spill, according to an extensive report by Al Jazeera English.
"At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of
our friends caught 400 pounds of these," Tracy Kuhns, a commercial
fisher from Barataria, La., told Al Jazeera, showing a sample of the
eyeless shrimp.
Darla Rooks, another lifelong fisher from Port Sulfur, La., told the
broadcaster she was seeing "eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye
sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills and
others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills."
Rooks added that she had never seen such deformities in Gulf waters
in her life -- a refrain common to most fishers featured in the report
-- and said her seafood catch last year was "ten percent what it
normally is."
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