Lectures mix with research and the never ending quest for grant money to pay for the research, their salaries and those of their graduate students (slaves). Over the last 20 years grant money has become harder and harder to come by and some academics have chosen or been forced to choose between taking money from people with their own agenda in mind or doing something else with their lives. Some of these agendas you might agree with and some of them you might not. But, what happens is that if they take money from someone like BP it forces us to ask are they on the side of the truth or the money?

Ever since Copernicus and before him, scientists have been at the knife point of politics. Politics with it’s money, privileges, power and the threat of their removal as punishment if you talked outside accepted doctrine. These were all arrayed as choices they were and are forced to make.

With BP now under the gun for both civil and criminal damages in amounts that most of us have a hard time wrapping our minds around, they’re scrambling. Scrambling to get Gulf of Mexico marine scientists on their legal defense team. They’re using their immense financial resources to pay for information to be used to protect the company and and it’s masters. To legally mitigate our anger and frustration over a disaster that will hang around our necks for years to come.

The contract marine scientists are required to sign by BP forbids they from releasing, publishing their research, sharing it with others or talking about what they have collected for three or more years.

This type of work is allowed in most academic positions. Professors are allowed to work outside the university for a number of hours a week. Question is, should they, for whom and under what constraints?

That may be too deep a question for now but perhaps we should know now which scientists are working on the side of BP? We should also remember that sometimes pay doesn’t come in the form of a check but rather paid “research” trips to exotic locations and lecture tours around Europe. Full disclosure of all types of funding should be a public part of an academic’s life or how are we to trust what they say ever again? “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?”

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All of these species rely on the marshes, bayous and reefs of the Coast for survival at some point their lives. If they could talk, what would these species say to us – the humans who have put their lives in jeopardy?

We the blue crabs and shrimp go through several larval stages before we reach the mature form you’re familiar with. Our larvae are small, delicate and environmentally sensitive.They use the marshes for food and shelter from predators. Your oil is breaking down and using up the oxygen that our children need to survive. It coats or smothers them. The oil forces the fish that use our larvae for food into the few uncontaminated area that are left to us and we become a meal for them. These problems are bad enough but the oil will stay in the marshes for many breeding seasons causing us yet unknown problems.

We the oysters sit on our reefs, watch the oil come and can’t move out of the way. We are filter feeders and before humans came into our world with their impacts on our environment we once filtered the entire water column of places like Mobile Bay in less than a week. When the oil from the leaking well arrives it is washed onto our reefs by the tides and wind and smothers many of us. As with our brothers the crabs, the oil decomposes and uses up the oxygen in the water making it unavailable to us and our larvae that need it for survival and we die. The reefs, our homes may not be free of oil for years to come and even if they’re free of it by next year we wouldn’t be able to reproduce because we’re dead.

We the fish, unlike crabs and oysters, are made up of many species of all sizes, shapes and colors. Our life cycles are varied but one thing we have in common with our brother species is that we need the marshes. Our eggs and children suffer they same fate as the others but as adult fish we can move out of the way but where will we go? The oil is everywhere. Some of us spawn in the Gulf and our eggs wash in with the tide. Others reproduce in bays, creeks and rivers. Some spawn in or near the marshes. Problem is that the oil in the marshes can’t be completely removed. Oil will continue to leech out with the tides and rain over the months and years to come continuing to kill us. Biologists don’t know exactly what the long-term chronic effects of this will be but it can’t be good. The beaches can be cleaned, sand replaced and they’re made whole again, the marshes can’t.

If the coastal species could leave us a message in the sand maybe it would go something like this.

Why do you kill us?
Animals asked the humans.
It is our nature.

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The three most common species of shrimp caught and landed in Alabama are from the Penaeus genus. Brown shrimp, P. aztecus, is the most common and starts being landed around the first half of June. Pink shrimp P. duorarum start in mid-summer followed by the white shrimp P. setiferus in the fall.

The Alabama commercial shrimping industry lands millions of pounds of each of these three species each year. According the NMFS from 2000 to 2008 103 million pounds of brown shrimp were landed in Alabama worth $211 million dollars. For pinks the landings were 5 million pounds at $9 million dollars and for whites 44 million pounds at $101 million dollars. The weights for all species are with the head on and the value is ex-vessel. Ex-vessel value is the price paid to the fishermen. Apart from their time of availability, browns in June, pinks soon after and whites in the Fall, each species has unique physical characteristics that help identify them. Colors can be misleading so avoid these for exact identification.

Looking from the top there are grooves that run along each side of the head. For the white shrimp these grooves run just to the base of the rostrum and they have antennae that are very long, about twice the body length. Browns and pinks are harder to tell apart. Both have grooves run almost the full length of the head with the antennae in each about as long as the body. About half way down the tail on the pinks there two spots, one on either side of the third or fourth abdominal segment. It’s these spots that give the pinks away. If you’d like more information about commercial catches try the Internet under ‘Shrimp’ or ‘NMFS landings’.

There is a deep water species call royal red shrimp that are caught on the continental shelf in very deep water and believe it or not they are really red.

There is another species called rock shrimp. If you like your shrimp tasty and enjoy a work out when you peal them give these guys a try.

Some interesting facts about shrimp include: the average female shrimp can spawn up to 500,000 eggs a year, life span of a shrimp is up to two years – rarely three, shrimp grow from egg to adult in six to nine months and they spawn in the Gulf and their eggs are washed in on the tide.

With the BP oil spill now affecting the nearshore and inshore areas its impact on the shrimp fishery may be severe.

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I was 70 miles away working on a dam in the Columbia River when Mount St. Helens exploded. The local and sub-regional biological effects were immediate and devastating. Deer, elk, bear and thousands of square miles of timber were all gone in a few minutes and man did nothing to cause it.

These shifts in an ecosystem’s population balance are not abnormal but are part of the natural cycle of life. Many of the biological changes in our recent history are due to both intentional and unintentional human manipulation of balanced ecosystems. Once humans stopped being hunter-gathers and developed a settled agrarian life they began to alter their local ecosystems through farming and animal husbandry activities. By doing this we removed organisms and controlled environmental conditions that were not conducive to growing the plant and animal products we wanted. These activities narrowed the ability of the ecosystem to respond to change and thus allowed for uncontrolled expansion of populations of organisms that thrived in the systems we modified. Modern transportation systems are so rapid that pathological organisms can move from one part of the globe to another and start affecting our crops and animals before we are even aware of them. History provides us with many examples.

Within living memory there‘re several examples for plants. One slow motion change was the Dutch elm disease. The Elm is a tree whose stately form and cooling shade have been extolled in song and verse for centuries. Scientists believe the fungus that causes Dutch elm disease originated in the Himalayas. It traveled to Europe from the Dutch East Indies in the late1800’s. In the 1930’s, the disease spread to North America on wooden crates made with infected elm wood and began killing elm trees. A second introduction of the disease into North America occurred in 1945 starting in Sorel, Quebec. It destroyed over half the elm trees remaining from the first infection in eastern Canada and the US. By 1976, only 34 million elm trees were left and now over half of these are gone. In England new strains of the fungi have appeared and 17 million of that country’s remaining 23 million elm trees have been killed.

Another plant that was heavily impacted by a transplanted organism was the potato. It was affected by a blight, which caused the Irish potato famine. In 1845 the fungus Phytophthora infestans arrived accidentally in Ireland from North America. A slight variation in climate at that time brought warm wet weather to Ireland, which the blight thrived on. Much of the Irish potato crop at that time was made up of only two species and these rotted in the fields. More than a million Irish citizens, about one of every nine, died of starvation or disease in the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. This famine resulted in mass Irish emigration to America.One plant plague that I can relate to is the chestnut blight which has killed all but a very few of the American chestnut trees. The chestnut blight is a fungal disease, Cryphonectria parasitica. It was accidentally introduced to the United States around 1900-1908, either in imported chestnut lumber or imported chestnut trees and by 1940 the American chestnut had been made virtually extinct by this disease. The American chestnut was once the most important forest tree throughout much of the eastern United States but has been driven to the brink of extinction. It is estimated that before the 1900’s one out of four trees in the eastern US were American chestnut, for a total of some 3.5 billion trees. The number of surviving mature trees can now be counted in the dozens due to the blight. You can still find this tree in New England but you have to know where and what to look for.

On the Gulf Coast we are now faced with another human induced problem – the BP oil spill. This human caused disaster has the potential for both long and short term effects on the varied and delicate ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico. The vast majority of the aquatic species in the Gulf depend on the marshes, esturaries and wetlands for part or all of their life cycles.With the oil now in some of Louisiana’s marshes and the rest of the northern Gulf Coast threatened the what if’s need to be consided – hoping that it never happens.

Short term – we have the potential to lose most of the shrimp and oyster seasons and other than a few disaster tourists the majority of the beach crowds as well.
Long term – the mashes are nursery areas and the oil’s impact could last for years. Reducing the year classes of commercial and recreational vertebrate and invertebrate species. Since oysters are filter feeders the effects of the spill has the potential shut the fishery down for some time? Oysters tasting like oil don’t sell well.
With our hunger for oil unabating, it is not a matter of if but when this happens again.

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In the past the common people looked upon the oyster as an important food source and while the elite considered it a delicacy. Though, there are other reasons that they’re prized. Oysters have, apparently, always been linked with love.

Alabama’s oysters usually live in water between eight and 25 feet. Oysters start spawning in the spring when the water temperature rises above a certain level and again in the early fall when it falls below that point. This triggers a chain reaction of spawning, which clouds the water with hundreds of millions of eggs and sperm. Their free-swimming larvae are called spat, which settle on any hard substrate, but prefer oyster shells. Oysters are hermaphrodites, which change sex when there isn’t enough of the opposite sex around to provide for enough spawn. Oysters mature at an early age (one year). A single female oyster produces 10 to 100 million eggs annually. Over time, as the oysters live and die their shells form reefs with many nooks and crannies that have over fifty times the surface area of flat bottom. These oyster reefs provide habitat for a wide range of animals like worms, snails, juvenile crabs and fish.

The oysters in Alabama are eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica). Oysters are filter feeders consuming algae and other water borne foods and when they’re feeding can pump up to eight gallons of seawater a day through their bodies. I have read statements that when Alabama’s oyster beds were untouched many years ago the oysters could turnover all the waters of Mobile Bay in about five days.

Now with the looming threat of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill’s effects on seafood the oyster’s filtering of seawater may lead to some problems.

When and if the oil slick moves into the oysters beds and marshes the oysters will start to filter out particulates and oil droplets giving them an unacceptable hydrocarbon taste. If the shallower beds become coated with oil the oysters could suffocate. If the oil and tar balls get deep into the marshes they would become a source of oil and
particulates for many months potentially leading to prolonged chronic contamination of the oyster beds.

Oysters will naturally purge themselves over a period of a few weeks and if the slick can be stopped or minimized the worst effects of the spill can be avoided.
Follow this link http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/05/-make-a-mistake-about/ to read more details and also the potential of the dispersant to have harmful effects on oyster eggs and young oysters (spat).

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A generalist is an animal that can live and survive by a variety of methods. These ways can include being able to live in a range of habitats, use a wide range of organisms for food or have multiple methods of reproduction. Generalists can be said to have strong adaptive traits. Take sharks as an example. Generalists can live in either salt or freshwater and everything in between, reproduce in a variety of ways, eat just about anything that swims, floats or crawls and have proven their adaptability by surviving for millions of years.

Specialists are animals that maximize their survivability by completely adapting to a particular specialized habitat. Excellent examples are several species of plants called bromeliads that live in the Amazon River basin. Some species of bromeliads only live within a total area of a couple of hundred square meters at over 200 feet above the ground in the overstory of the rain forest. They are so specialized that any small change in their habitat could be cause for their extinction. With fish an example of a specialist might be the clown fish, which lives within the arms of the stinging sea anemone for protection or the remora, which attaches to the belly of sharks and lives on the scraps from the shark’s meal that float by. If the anemone or shark dies the clown fish or remora will have a hard time surviving.

Humans are what we like to consider as the ultimate generalist with their strongest adaptive trait being their intelligence. Examples of this include: when it gets cold we make and wear clothes; learn how to use fire; grow and preserve food and invent ways to defend ourselves from predators. The one thing we have yet to learn very well is to adapt to our finite environment that is constantly changing and which has a limited amount of resources. Examples of this inability include driving an SUV when oil prices are high, failing to build or use mass transit and over populating the planet.

People, in modern times, have tended toward specialization with individuals being unable to grow their own food, make clothes, build shelters or fix their computers. In a time of changing conditions generalists have the best probability of survival while the specialist, under more stable conditions, will come out on top. Which one are you?

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If possible business owners, real estate rental agencies and individuals should bring a brief summary of what they calculate are their current losses due to the spill.
Officials with the AGCACC have also released phone numbers for more information about help with cleanup efforts on the coast.

·    To volunteer with the beach cleanup, call 251-431-6409 or 1-888-421-1266.
·    For information about working the cleanup, contact Don Fisher, Associate Director, Field Services, Governor’s Office of Workforce Development, at 334-293-4711.

I am also on www.facebook.com with other locals who are involved.

Think Global – Act Local!

The most people are waxing and waning between frustration and anger, blaming BP and the federal government for not being prepared enough. Some feel that the booms will protect the marshes but they are like putting bubble gum on arterial bleeding. Once the waves get over three feet the oil will lap over the booms assuming that they hold together.  Another thing is that the freshwater from the bays will sit over the more saline Gulf water and some of the oil will be forced into the interface between the two and go under the booms.

What is he bottom line?

We all hope that the spill could misses us entirely but if the well keeps putting out oil for the next two or three months like BP and the feds say the chances of that are minimal.

Short term – we have the potential to lose most of the shrimp and oyster seasons and other than a few disaster tourists the majority of the beach crowds as well.

Long term – the mashes are nursery areas and the oil’s impact could last for years. Reducing the year classes of commercial and recreational vertebrate and invertebrate species. Since oysters are filter feeders the effects of the spill has the potential shut the fishery down for some time? Oysters tasting like oil don’t sell well.

The marshes, creeks, bayous and oyster reefs are nursery grounds for the vast majority of the seafood caught in the Gulf of Mexico. Looking at the aquatic life, the majority of adult fish and crabs will have a chance to move out of the way as the oil moves in but the eggs and juveniles cannot. Oysters on their reefs cannot move and will be contaminated.

Once the oil settles into the marshes it will be next to impossible to completely remove. Its effects could be a long-term chronic level of pollution impacting the seafood industry for years to come.

An emergency meeting of the Gulf Shores City Council was held at city hall in Gulf Shores on 1 May 2010. An emergency resolution was passed that allows the City Council to do preemptive contracting to help with the beach cleanup. The Council indicated that the cleanup would start as the oil comes ashore rather than waiting until the leak is plugged. Booms will be placed in critical area to divert the oil so it can be removed by skimming.

The Council said that a boom would be placed at Little Lagoon Pass. If this boom looks like it will fail the Council will close the pass with sand. If it looks like the Lagoon waters will overflow at some other point on the lagoon the pass will be opened at low tide to let the water out and then plugged again.

If you would like to volunteer to help with the clean up you can follow this link. http://www.wkrg.com/gulf_oil_spill/article/volunteers-needed-for-possible-oil-spill-cleanup/879708/Apr-28-2010_2-38-pm/.

Good luck to us all.

Think Global – Act Local!