Cajun Seafood Safety & BP

BP and the state of Louisiana wrangle over a long term seafood plan. BP wants to cover five years, while the state wants twenty. DailyComet reported:

Alaska's Prince William Sound has lost its herring fishery and the viability of salmon is questionable, even today, he said, because fish eggs came into contact with residual oil.

The Gulf’s fisheries are currently entering spawning seasons, which will be the first of many where eggs could come in contact with oil from the BP catastrophe.

Gulf waters have three types of oil, residual, diffused and dispersed. One fisherman told NewsHour:

There's tons of it on the bottom... Wherever the oil came in, there's still tons of it underneath the water.

Public test samples show high levels of toxicity. Per EPA testing these would kill over 50% of juvenile shrimp or silverfish over 2 to 4 days. There are no long term exposure results. There are no tests on fish eggs.

A LSU professor said in reference to the government's assertion that most of the oil is gone:

There's no way, I mean, given that at one point the oil slick at the surface was the size of the state of Kansas. I mean, we know that there were numerous plumes of oil below the sea. There's no way there's been time to do a full assessment of what may still be beneath the surface. And I think that's what most of us are a little bit more worried about now.

The great Gulf science experiment continues, driven by a company focused on risk management.