Large fish kill found at mouth of Mississippi River Gulf outlet

[Robbien]

Source: CNN

(CNN) -- Thousands of dead fish and other marine life have been found at the mouth of the Mississippi River outlet into the Gulf of Mexico, according to the president of St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana.

"I'm talking about 5,000 to 15,000 dead fish," Craig Taffaro said of the Sunday discovery. Dead species included crabs, sting rays and a variety of fish.

According to Taffaro, there is some "recoverable oil" in the area but there also have been "oxygen issues," so officials don't know yet if the fish kill is related to the BP oil spill. Officials from the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Department are investigating.

Taffaro said the discovery underscores the need "to continue to monitor our waters."

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/23/gulf.fish.kill/

---

No idea why they died.

Couldn't be oil cause BP/Govt assures us that oil is all gone.

Officials mystified.

[msongs]

1. large fish kill? no small or medium size ones? nt

[Critters2]

2. Officials mystified.

Apparently, officials mystify easily.

[MikeW]

4. ah they happen all the time up here

Usually Menhaden being chased by bluefish. Its low O2 areas up here ... the Menh. cant take it while being chased by the Blues
they just go belly up almost instantly.

[Robbien]

6. Oh sure, fifteen thousand fish up and die every day all at once in one spot

And since when are crabs and sting rays classified as menhaden?

[GoCubsGo]

11. Yes, they do die off all at once in one spot.

I see from your profile that you are in Chicago. I'm guessing you haven't been around for the any alewife die-offs in Lake Michigan. There were die-offs during the 1960s and 1970s where millions of them washed up on the beaches.

[bettyellen]

21. then you'd get the lake flies right?

[eowyn_of_rohan]

18. They were Stingrays, Crabs, and a Variety of other fish

they didn't mention menhadens

[Javaman]

38. "I don't think anyone could have anticipated this!". I get tired of writing that. nt

[CreekDog]

3. Shellfish is safe

and as a bonus, easy to catch! :eyes:

[mattvermont]

5. whoever thought that planes

would be used as a weapon?

Condi Rice

[Raster]

7. "If we'd only know the flights and the seat numbers, we could have done something."

[TheEuclideanOne]

12. Funny, that exact quote was when I knew something was fishy.....

I remember seeing her make that quote on the news a few days after seeing some documentary about how countries have considered flying planes into buildings. As soon as she finished that sentence I knew that there was something rotten in Denmark.

[BrklynLiberal]

8. The study to find out why this happened will take years and cost millions....

and when the conclusion is finally revealed....in ten years or so....it will be on page 20, below the fold.

[madrchsod]

9. that area is in the dead zone..

with the amount of water that has flowed down the Mississippi this year i`m going with a good old agricultural run off,man made pollution do to the floods since spring,and top it all off with a dose of oil.


http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2009/06/noaa-predicts-large-dead-zone-in-gulf.html

[MikeW]

10. yea most likely O2

[pitohui]

14. of course you are correct and we both know you're correct but hush!

bp is trying to be stand up and will pay damages, big ag which has been killing our fish for years and causing dead zones for years won't pay us fuck all

so we pursue and punish the guy who does the decent thing and the true evil doer over decades skates...

there needs to be a way to make big ag responsible for these dead zones but they have seized the opportunity w. this oil spill to put it all on the oil industry...

[Nihil]

33. Sigh ... you are right of course but still ... sigh ... (n/t)

:shrug:

[Jefferson23]

13. Fishing Industry in Gulf Still Worried About Levels of Toxins in the Water

and the Impact on Marine Life.

From Democracy Now:
snip*
DAHR JAMAIL: Last Thursday, I went out on a boat with Mr. Miller, as well as his friend and another commercial fisherman, Mark Stewart. Both of them are long-term, multi-generational fishermen in Mississippi, and they also are both former members of BP’s Vessels—so-called Vessels of Opportunity program, the VOO program, both recently released from that program as BP scales back its response efforts. And they’re very concerned because they usually trawl for shrimp around the Mississippi Sound and sometimes outside the barrier islands of Mississippi, and they—what they told me, and actually what they showed me, is that the area is extremely unsafe, that oil, submerged oil, mixed with dispersants, have infiltrated the area.


We drove around on his trawler for several hours, and you could watch on the sonar clouds popping up. We were in about twelve, thirteen feet of water. And the middle part of the area would literally fill up with a big cloud, and we would stop the boat, and he would basically drop down, tie some sorbent pad to a grappling hook, drop it down in the water and pull it up, and it would be covered in sort of a slimy, brown oil-dispersant mix. And it was—we did that eight times. Every single time, we caught oil and dispersant mix.


And it was a very disturbing thing to see, in addition to the fact that these guys said, "Look, we refuse to fish here, because this is so toxic, and we can see that there’s less life here." They have friends who have started to try to fish, because the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources on August 6 reopened much of their fishing grounds to commercial fishermen and recreational fishermen. And they know personally, both Miller and Stewart—they know commercial fishermen who are going out and catching either nothing or a maximum 200 pounds of shrimp per go, in a situation where normally they would be catching between 700 pounds and a thousand pounds a night. And according to them, 200 pounds, you can’t even pay your—cover your expenses with that much. They’re also reporting seeing crabs in the middle of the day trying to crawl out of the water, because there is not enough oxygen in the water. They’re seeing far, far less birdlife and overall marine life throughout the entire Mississippi Sound, as well.


AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about who is spraying the dispersant, Dahr?


DAHR JAMAIL: These men, along with numerous other commercial fishermen, all of which were members of the VOO program in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the western Panhandle of Florida, are all pointing the finger at BP for hiring out-of-state contractors, meaning not Gulf Coast community workers but people who don’t live on the—in the Gulf Coast region, to come in and go out in a type of boat called a Carolina Skiff, which is basically being used as a utility boat. Both Miller and Stewart both told me they’ve been eyewitness to this. And these boats basically go out to the areas that VOO workers identify as oiled areas, that the VOO workers will go up in all four states over the last several months, find the oil, call in the location to BP command, be sent away from that oil, and then they will see, as they go in from their day of work out on the water, they’ll see these foreign—these out-of-state contract workers, private contractors, going out in these Carolina Skiff boats with big white tanks in them, 375-gallon white tanks, and go out and spray the oil. And Stewart and Miller both told me they were eyewitness to this personally, that they saw these boats at times hosing down from the boats with dispersants giant patches of oil floating in the water. And then, when they would come—the VOO workers would come back out the next day, go to where the oil was they had located the day before, and there would be nothing but a big pasty, white, emulsified, foamy substance atop the water, which has become commonly known throughout the Gulf region now as the remnants of dispersed oil, after they come out, hit it with dispersants, sink the oil, and then that’s all that’s left. And this has been reported to me by commercial fishermen, most of which were members of the VOO program in all four of the most heavily affected states to date.

in full: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/23/fishing_industry_in_gulf_still_worrried

[glitch]

39. Democracy Now was good today as well. Talking about factory farms and their spewage.

Massive fish die offs every year at the mouth of the Mississippi.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/24/david_kirby_on_the_looming_threat

Now doesn't that make everyone feel so much better?

[Thor_MN]

15. Why isn't every oil rig required to aerate the surronding water?

If they used the methane that they flare off to power compressors, it wouldn't even cost that much.

[unkachuck]

16. "Officials mystified."

....hmmm, tarballs?

[Judi Lynn]

17. K & R.

:kick: :kick: :kick: :kick:

[HCE SuiGeneris]

19. 'Big Oil" exacts its terror daily

And, we all are paying dearly.

[Lightning Count]

20. Probably not due to the oil spill.

If it's at the mouth, then I'm guessing it's coming from upriver. Something really bad too.

[kpete]

22. Thousands of dead fish reported at mouth of Mississippi

Source: AFP

Thousands of dead fish reported at mouth of Mississippi

(AFP) – 3 hours ago

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Thousands of fish have turned up dead at the mouth of Mississippi River, prompting authorities to check whether oil was the cause of mass death, local media reports said Monday.

The fish were found Sunday floating on the surface of the water and collected in booms that had been deployed to contain oil that leaked from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Times-Picayune reported.

"By our estimates there were thousands, and I'm talking about 5,000 to 15,000 dead fish," St Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro was quoted as saying in a statement.

He said crabs, sting rays, eel, drum, speckled trout and red fish were among the species that turned up dead.

Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iZ90Bp8_6KjVPzvuYBVfEzugzJng

[ananda]

23. Are we supposed to venture a guess?

Answers on a postcard please, sent to BP.

[truthisfreedom]

24. "We don't want to jump to any conclusions because we've had some oxygen issues...

...by the Bayou La Loutre Dam from time to time."

I think you got some different issues this time. Dispersant, my guess.

[chervilant]

25. Oh, but,

75% of the oil spilled has disappeared, don't you know?!? Surely, it cannot be the oil spill that has caused all these dead sea creatures! It MUST be a leftist plot! The damned liberals went out into the Gulf and killed those fish just to make BP look bad!!!!

Sigh... I could write copy for FOX, but I just couldn't live with the foul stench of deceit.

[primavera]

27. +1

:applause: LMAO! Yep, that's sadly about the size of it, alright.

[femrap]

26. .

Goddess, do I detest the oil boyz.

The commercials on TV from BP are on my last nerve. May the oil boyz be flaccid for eternity.

Thank you, Goddess.

[msongs]

28. quite a few dead fish in our local grocery stores as well nt

[HCE SuiGeneris]

29. K&R

Terrorism by "Big Oil" exacted daily.

[madrchsod]

30. dead zone....

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2009/06/noaa-predicts-large-dead-zone-in-gulf.html


the oil disaster is`t making matters any better

[Mimosa]

31. Oh, Lord, why does Louisiana have to be the victim again? n/t

[Nihil]

34. Because that's where the Mississippi tips all of the crap it's picked up into the sea.

Geography is another thing that seems to be a problem at times.
Add it to the list behind history, maths, chemistry, physics, biology, ...

:shrug:

[xchrom]

32. some officials are always 'surprised' - and some are always 'mystified'.

i wonder if they have monday morning office meetings to determine who is 'surprised' and who is 'mystified'?

[JCMach1]

35. 5-10 years of this 'quiet' disaster wouldn't be so shocking considering

how much oil is still out there.

[LTX]

37. This "quiet" disaster has been going on for more than 30 years.

http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/deadzones/?searchterm=None

You won't hear anyone from the midwest states acknowledging it though. They'd rather point the finger at the oil spill and claim it's all brand new.

[JCMach1]

41. exactly, see the documentary 'Gaslands' if you haven't already

Redtide is about to become a regular fixture in the Gulf.

[LTX]

36. Farmers along the Mississippi

bottomlands from Louisiana to Minnesota are the most likely culprits in this fish kill. Not the oil spill.

http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/deadzones/?searchterm=None

It'd be nice if they'd fess up, instead of using the oil spill as a convenient foil to avoid their decades-long (and continuing) responsibility.

[glitch]

40. Factory farmers especially

plenty of blame to go around in our sick system.

[Earth_First]

42. +100

This unfortunately is an annual event which very rarely gets reported upon.

However, as soon as one makes waves on this topic; they are shouted at and accused of a Vegan lifestyle campaign agenda against factory farming...