One-third of seafood mislabeled, study finds

If you order tuna at a D.C. restaurant, chances are half the time you’ll be getting another, less expensive fish in its place. But those odds are better than if you had wanted snapper. Testers nationwide found that 87 percent of the time, restaurants and grocery stores were selling something else under that label.

As much as one-third of seafood sold in restaurants and groceries is fraudulently labeled, according to a report the advocacy group Oceana released Thursday. The group sampled 674 retail outlets in the District and 20 states between 2010 and 2012, often finding cheaper, farmed fish being sold in place of wild-caught ones.

Ninety-five percent of the sushi restaurants, 52 percent of other restaurants and 27 percent of grocery stores surveyed sold mis­labeled seafood. While academics, consumer groups and media outlets in the United States and elsewhere have scrutinized fish labeling before and found major errors, Oceana’s effort is one of the largest seafood investigations to date. Read more >>

Radioactive “Dirt” Hits Tokyo

Fukushima has been decimated by radiation. But Fukushima City has less than 300,000 residents. And all of Fukushima prefecture has 2 million.  On the other hand, greater Tokyo – the world’s largest megacity – has 35 million inhabitants.

Tokyo soil has been blanketed by Fukushima radiation, even though the Japanese capital is 170 miles from the Fukushima nuclear complex. Indeed, officials just found “high levels” of radiation at 13 of 14 areas tested in a Tokyo public park.

Now, substances with even higher levels of radiation are showing up around Tokyo. Minamisoma city council member Koichi Oyama writes: People in Tokyo, the black substance is here! Read more >>

Deepwater Spill Causing Gulf Damage 2 Years Later, Scientists Find

Platform supply vessels battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Biologists are finding signs of lingering — and perhaps growing — damage throughout the gulf, from the bottom of the food chain to the top:

Scientists have confirmed that tiny creatures called zooplankton accumulated toxic compounds from coming in contact with the Deepwater Horizon oil. Because small fish and crustaceans eat the zooplankton and are then eaten by larger fish, that means those compounds could now be working their way up the food chain, they said.

Three months after BP shut off the flow of oil, scientists searching the floor of the gulf found a colony of deep sea corals that were covered in what they described as “frothy gunk.” They were in the area where undersea plumes of oil had been spotted. Nearly half were dead. Extensive tests resulted in a finding, released just last month, that the culprit was in fact oil from Deepwater Horizon. More...

BP still using dispersants - whistleblowers receiving death threats

Image by Geoff Livingston via Flickr

Excerpt from Truthout:
Birren also told Truthout that fishermen she knows, who are speaking out against BP dispersant practices, "are getting death threats and notes on their cars saying you better watch out, because there are people above us who want to keep this quiet. But I know entire families who are sick because of the dispersants."

Birren does not believe the crisis is over and believes the Gulf and inland waters have been "prematurely re-opened to fishing."

She and the coalition of commercial fishermen she and Guidry are a part of are concerned about the credibility of Gulf Coast fishermen being damaged by contaminated seafood being delivered to the market. Birren also wrote, "As fisherman, we know that the use of dispersants has made this crisis vastly worse for everyone. It is time that government step up and protect us, our Gulf and the American public from further and possibly irreversible harm."

"It's now down to regular people like me trying to do what the government should be doing to take care of us," she told Truthout. "It's awful, it's really bad. If Obama is not going to be a strong enough president to protect us, we'll have to do it ourselves. We're on our own down here." More...

Tulane researchers indicate COREXIT now in blue crab larvae from Florida to Texas

Image via Wikipedia

floridaoilspilllaw.com

A report today from Fox 8 in New Orleans reveals that the “orange blobs found lodged in the bodies of tiny blue crab larvae collected from marshes that stretch from Texas to Florida” appear to contain Corexit, according to preliminary results from researchers at Tulane University.

The report says BP’s dispersant “may do more harm than the oil itself.”

University of New Orleans’ Martin O’Connell, Ph.D said, “No one really knows” if Corexit will bio-accumulate. “If you’re a small fish and you eat 1,000 of these small crab larvae and all of them have oil or Corexit droplets in them they could get into the fish — that little fish could be eaten and so on and so on.”

Pondering the future of the Gulf, O’Connell said, “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.”

Florida toxicologist Dr. William Sawyer, who has been hired on behalf of sickened fishermen and cleanup workers, says “some of these chemicals are in great excess — of risk-based lethal levels — that the current hydrocarbon levels are capable of sterilizing our fisheries and estuary production zones.”

The Fox 8 report concludes, “Since so many fish and crabs feed on crab larvae, some scientists fear the oil and dispersant droplets threaten to kill critical areas in the Gulf of Mexico food web.”

Whale sharks swimming in heavy oil four miles from Deepwater

Swimming with a whale shark off the Alabama coast

This week's report: Three whale sharks swimming in heavy oil four miles from the gushing Deepwater Horizon wellhead. "Our worst fears are realized. They are not avoiding the spill area," said Eric Hoffmayer, the University of Southern Mississippi scientist who found the large aggregation last week. "Those animals are going to succumb. Taking mouthfuls of oil is not good. It is not the toxicity that will kill them. It's that oil is going to be sticking to their gills and everything else."

Whale sharks, the largest fish on earth, feed by filtering plankton and tiny fish from the water through sieve-like mechanisms in their mouths.

"Based on all the information I'm getting, they are doing the normal things regardless of the oil. The idea that sharks have these evolved senses that will protect them -- well, they haven't evolved to detect oil," Hoffmayer said.

He tagged whale sharks on the Ewing Bank in June of last year. The satellite trackers showed that some of the animals spent that July migrating hundreds of miles toward the Alabama coast and Florida Panhandle. If they follow the same route this year, it would carry them straight through the heart of the spill. More...