tagged w/ lobsters
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Parasites, pesticides, sick salmon and dead lobsters.
These four things have become an issue in Passamaquoddy Bay, and no one seems to be happy about it.
Not the salmon aquaculture operators, who are using pesticides to combat a damaging outbreak of sea lice at their fish pens in Passamaquoddy Bay and adjacent Cobscook Bay. Not environmentalists, who are concerned about the effect the pesticides might be having on surrounding marine life. And not lobster fishermen, who fear the use of pesticides has contributed to widespread lobster deaths in the past.
Officials in Canada are looking into the use of pesticides in and near Passamaquoddy Bay as part of separate investigations into the deaths of lobsters off Grand Manan Island in late 2009 and off Deer Island in early 2010. Both islands are located directly across the international border within easy eyesight of Maine.
Lobsters and sea lice, both crustaceans, are highly vulnerable to pesticides that salmon farm operators have been using and then disposing of in coastal waters, according to officials.
As part of the investigation, Environment Canada executed a search warrant in November at eight facilities in New Brunswick owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, a salmon aquaculture firm that also operates salmon farms in Maine. Cooke officials have said they are cooperating with the ongoing investigations.
According to media reports, cypermethrin, a pesticide that is licensed for use in Maine but banned in Canada, was detected on the dead lobsters found off the two Canadian islands.
In a Dec. 29 e-mail, Henry Lau, a spokesman for Environment Canada, declined to specifically verify whether cypermethrin was detected on the dead lobsters found a few miles away from Maine’s border. He wrote that the Canadian federal agency is investigating the lobster deaths under the authority of Canada’s Fisheries Act, which bans fish-harming substances from being deposited into fish-bearing waters.
“Cypermethrin is considered to be harmful to crustaceans including lobster and shrimp,” Lau wrote.
There have been no reports of dead lobsters or of other immediate ill effects in Maine from the use of pesticides in the two bays, but state and lobster industry officials in Maine are keeping tabs on the Environment Canada investigations and on the use of pesticides on both sides of the border to make sure Maine’s lobster indus-try, the largest commercial fishery in the state, and Maine’s marine environment are not harmed.
In 2009, the total statewide landings of lobster in Maine had an estimated cumulative value of $228 million, according to official Maine Department of Marine Resources statistics. Farmed salmon, the second most lucrative fishery in Maine, brought in $38.7 million in direct revenue to the state’s economy the same year. Official estimated financial values for the two fisheries in 2010 are not yet available.
Lobster and pesticides
The presence of pesticides in waters off the East Coast has been a concern for lobster fishermen since at least 1999, when the Long Island Sound lobster population plummeted after anti-mosquito pesticides were sprayed in the New York City area to fight the spread of West Nile virus. Long Island Sound fishermen later sued the pesticide manufacturers and then settled out of court for more than $16 million.
Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said recently that lobstermen have good reason to be wary of pesticide use in or near coastal waters. If not used properly, she said, “a pesticide for salmon lice would be extremely dangerous to lobsters.”
McCarron said, however, that many aquaculture farmers in Maine have close connections to the lobster industry and take pains to avoid harming the marine environment. Still, the use of pesticides in salmon aquaculture operations needs to be very precise and tightly controlled, she said.
“It’s a fine line to make sure you use the proper amount,” McCarron said. “We have to find the right balance of sharing the ocean so industries can coexist.”
Jon Lewis, aquaculture environmental coordinator for DMR, said recently that besides monitoring the use of cypermethrin in state waters, Maine officials also have noted that a pesticide called AlphaMax, which contains the chemical deltamethrin, recently was used for the first time at salmon farms on the Canadian side of Pas-samaquoddy Bay. AlphaMax has not been licensed for use in Maine because no one has sought state approval to do so, he said.
But that has not prevented DMR officials from consulting with their Canadian counterparts about the toxicity and use of AlphaMax, Lewis said. DMR has not performed any studies or testing of deltamethrin on its own, he said.
According to Lewis, Canadian officials have told DMR that AlphaMax weakens and disperses in the water so that, 15 minutes after it has been released, it cannot be detected within 100 meters of the pens where it was used. With those results in mind, he added, testing for AlphaMax miles away on the American side of Passama-quoddy Bay would not appear to be a worthwhile use of DMR resources.
But Lewis said he understands why lobstermen might take an interest in the presence of pesticides in the ocean and in the dead-lobster investigations in New Brunswick.
“I don’t blame the lobstermen for being concerned,” Lewis said. “Obviously, it targets crustaceans.”
cont.Parasites, pesticides, sick salmon and dead lobsters.
These four things have become... more
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Photo: Crews worked Saturday on the failed top kill effort to stanch the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. BP will try another strategy.
May 29, 2010
BP Prepares to Take New Tack on Leak After ‘Top Kill’ Fails
By LESLIE KAUFMAN and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
NEW ORLEANS — In another serious setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said Saturday that the “top kill” technique had failed and, after consultation with government officials, they had decided to move on to another strategy.
Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said at a news conference that the engineers would try once again to solve the problem with a containment cap and that it could take four to seven days for the device to be in place.
“After three full days of attempting top kill, we now believe it is time to move on to the next of our options,” Mr. Suttles said.
The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.
BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August — further contributing to what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.
The latest failure will undoubtedly put more pressure — both politically and from the public — on the Obama administration to take some sort of action, perhaps taking control of the repair effort completely from BP.
President Obama, who is spending the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, issued a statement Saturday evening on the decision to abandon the top kill.
“While we initially received optimistic reports about the procedure, it is now clear that it has not worked,” Mr. Obama said.
He said that Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard had “directed BP to launch a new procedure whereby the riser pipe will be cut and a containment structure fitted over the leak.”
“This approach is not without risk and has never been attempted before at this depth,” Mr. Obama said. “That is why it was not activated until other methods had been exhausted.”
The president continued, “We will continue to pursue any and all responsible means of stopping this leak until the completion of the two relief wells currently being drilled.”
For BP, the besieged British company, the failure could mean billions of dollars of additional liabilities, as the spill potentially worsens in the weeks and months ahead.
“I am disappointed that this operation did not work,” Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, said in a statement. “We remain committed to doing everything we can to make this situation right.”
A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.
“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.
“The engineers are disappointed, and management is upset,” said the technician. “Nothing is good, nothing is good.”
The spill began after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 people. Since then, it has dumped an estimated 18 million to 40 million gallons into the gulf.
After the announcement Saturday, the disappointment was palpable along the Louisiana shoreline, where the oil has increasingly washed up in sticky, rusty globs.
Michel Claudet, the president of Terrebonne Parish, 60 miles southwest of New Orleans, said that when he heard the news, he felt “sorrow, despair and like this ordeal will never finish. If you go around the parish, it is all our folks talk about.”
Mr. Claudet said that he was trying to remain hopeful, but that it was increasingly difficult. “As every item fails,” he said, “I am less and less optimistic.”
In New Orleans, Margaret Shockey, 67, a retired teacher, said, “One thing’s for sure, this is the last city that deserved this.”
Last week, BP described the top kill — which was an effort to pump heavy mud into the well to counter the flow of oil — as its best hope for stopping the spill. During the course of the operation, BP officials had often expressed optimism that it would work.
But on Saturday, Mr. Suttles said the operation had pumped 30,000 barrels of mud into the well and yet failed to stop it from flowing.
Admiral Landry called the failure “very disappointing.”
The new strategy is to smoothly cut the riser from which the oil is leaking and then place a cap over it. Pipes attached to the cap would take the oil to a storage boat on the surface.
Though a first effort at a containment dome failed, Mr. Suttles said BP had learned from that experience and now believed that this cap, which is custom fitted to the riser, would be more successful.
He said it would capture most but not all of the oil leaking from the well, which is believed to be gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.
He would not give odds for the operation’s success, but said he had “a lot of confidence” that it would work.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Suttles said preparations for such an alternative plan were already under way, just in case. “That equipment is on stage and ready to go,” he said. Equipment is being deployed on land and on the seabed, he said.
If the new cap is not successful, the company has said it will look into attaching another blowout preventer to the one that already exists at the wellhead and has not functioned.
But officials emphasized that the real solution to the spill was the relief well. They said one of the relief wells was currently proceeding ahead of schedule, but was still at least a month away.
“It’s like a bad movie that just won’t end,” said Billy Altman, 45, a mechanic in New Orleans. “You know, you think they finally killed the bad guy, and then he comes back to life. It’s crazy.”
Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, and Leslie Kaufman from New Orleans. Robbie Brown contributed from New Orleans, and Sarah Wheaton from New York.Photo: Crews worked Saturday on the failed top kill effort to stanch the leaking oil... more
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BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico failed, the company's chief operating officer said Saturday.
The oil giant has tried for days to stop the the largest oil spill in U.S. history by pumping heavy, mudlike drilling fluid into a ruptured oil well, a method known as "top kill."
The next option is to place a custom-built cap known as the "lower marine riser package" over the leak, the company's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles said. BP crews were working Saturday to ready the materials for that option should it become necessary, he said.
"We've been prepping that all along in case we need to move to that option," he said. "People want to know which technique is going to work, and I don't know."
And if "lower marine riser package" were to fail, he said, BP engineers would try placing a second blowout preventer on top of the first, which failed to cut of the oil flow after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The failed blowout preventer is a 48-foot-tall, 450-ton apparatus that sits atop the well 5,000 feet underwater.
Meanwhile, teams in Louisiana were working Saturday on a clean-up project aimed at protecting coastal marshes while BP continues its efforts to stop oil from gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser has said that machines would suck oil out of marshes Saturday after crews determined where to deploy them.
Video: Fishermen woes
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Explainer: Stopping the leak RELATED TOPICS
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"We will begin to clean up some of those areas that fell by the wayside for the last couple weeks," he said.
Oil giant BP's focus has been trying to put a stop to what officials say is the largest oil spill in U.S. history, with as many as 19,000 barrels of crude gushing into the ocean daily.
By Sunday morning the company could know whether the "top kill" procedure -- pumping heavy drilling mud into the breached oil well at high pressure -- is working, said Robert Dudley, BP's managing director.
"It's like an arm-wrestling match of two equally strong forces," he said.
Government scientists on Thursday said as many as 19,000 barrels (798,000 gallons) of oil were spewing into the ocean every day, making this disaster perhaps twice the size of the Exxon Valdez incident.
Previously, BP officials and government scientists had said 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) of crude were flowing out daily.
"This is clearly an environmental catastrophe," BP CEO Tony Hayward said Friday. "There's no two ways about it."
Under intense political pressure to take control of the situation, President Obama toured the region on Friday.
"We want to stop the leak, we want to contain and clean up the oil and we want to help the people in this region return to their lives and livelihoods as soon as possible," the president told reporters.
About 25 percent of the Gulf of Mexico exclusive economic zone has been put off limits, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and fishermen are worried the gushing oil will take a more serious toll than Hurricane Katrina did in 2005.
"Katrina was nothing but rain, water and wind. This is poison. It's gas," oysterman Arthur Etienne said.
Obama said Friday that federal officials were prepared to authorize moving forward with "a portion of" an idea proposed by local officials, who want the Army Corps of Engineers to build a "sand boom" offshore to keep the water from getting into the fragile marshlands.
That did not satisfy Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who has advocated immediate construction of the booms. Noting in a written statement that 107 miles of the state's coast have been oiled, he said, "We continue to ask federal officials to approve our entire sand-boom plan from the northern Chandeleurs to the Isle Dernieres chain."
Obama said he has directed federal officials to triple the manpower in places where oil has hit shore or appears within a day of doing so.BP's "top kill" attempt to stop the flow of oil from a ruptured well in... more
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Sickest lines in spot:
"So rest assured, ladies, it's gonna be a rough day for you egg-layers"
AND
"Great day to be an American, bad day to be a chicken"
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Down with Denny's! ... among others.
As vegans, we often tell ourselves that if all the omnivores out there knew how and why animals were grown and slaughtered for our consumption, they'd surely give up animal products altogether. I've come to understand, however, that there are many reasons, besides misinformation, that keep the masses intent on maintaining the property status of animals. Some of these include tradition, convenience, taste, and social conformity.
Change isn't easy, especially when we grew up learning about all the "benefits" of animal products, whether it be their ability to provide lots of protein (way more than the average person needs), prevent osteoporosis (because of the calcium, which by the way, is actually supplemented because most of the calcium is leeched out of cow bones due to inhumane treatment), or provide us with energy (which would be way more efficient if we just got it from yummy and delicious greens, like the non-human animals do).
So - I get it. I get that really thinking about where we get meat, dairy, and eggs doesn't necessarily make the average person want to reach for an apple instead.
That being said, I must admit, I just can't wrap my head around using the concept of what is basically animal torture as a marketing campaign, which is what Denny's did when they unveiled their new ads during the Superbowl last night.
The gist is basically that chickens should be very worried and upset, because Denny's is offering up tons of cheap and free eggs, so they best be careful. Here are the three that I saw, although my guess is that more will be popping up over the next few months.
I was particularly grossed out by these two lines:
"So rest assured, ladies, it's gonna be a rough day for you egg-layers"
AND
"Great day to be an American, bad day to be a chicken"
I just don't get it. Not only do people know that the mass-production of eggs means a horrific life for chickens, but they actually make jokes about it, and use the information as a selling point???
It's not like Denny's is the first either. I remember Thanksgiving commercials showing cartoons of terrified turkeys, and a McLobster campaign that showed these little lobsters sneaking around and turning off all the neon signs advertising the sandwich made from their flesh. I would expect that to destroy someone's appetite, not whet it.
Paul McCartney, a famous vegetarian, once said that everyone would be vegetarian if slaughterhouses had glass walls. I guess he was wrong.
Thank you to Busy (Happy) VeganSickest lines in spot:
"So rest assured, ladies, it's gonna be a rough... more
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Yesterday I read an article about a teenage girl that got 1 year of jail time for putting a kitten in an oven in retaliation for something her roommate did. I think what she did was mean and wrong, but I also think the punishment was extreme. The majority of the commentators on Current seem to think it wasn't enough.
Lets put this in perspective. Dante Stallworth, a pro football player got drunk and killed someone and went to jail for 24 days and may not even miss a season in the NFL. Michael Vick killed dogs, apologized, went to jail for over a year, was bankrupted by fines (some of which required him to contribute to animal shelters and the care of dogs "rescued" from his home), and is still struggling to be allowed back into the NFL. WTF?
People get all mushy over animals that are commonly kept as pets but have little or no sympathy for animals that aren't pets. Thus they are hypocrites and don't even realize it. Do you think the girl that killed the cat should have gotten a year if it was a rat instead? a goldfish? cockroach? ant farm? or a pet lobster?
I think that is absurd considering people kill all sorts of creatures inhumanely. How many people have had fresh lobster...that was probably boiled alive? How many years should a chef get? Wait..I know what you’re thinking… “But people are going to eat the lobster!” Well, would it have made a difference if the girl ate the kitten afterwards? (Cats and dogs are eaten regularly in many countries.) Would that generated more sympathy from you?.... probably not!
It is already illegal to boil lobsters in Italy and animal rights groups are pushing to enact laws to protect crustaceans across Europe. Should it be illegal in the US?
I'm have sympathy for mistreated animals, but I have more sympathy for mistreated people. Every time we punish someone for killing an animal more severely then someone for killing a person we are devaluing human life.
I'm no hypocrite. We must either protect all creatures...down to roaches and bacteria or create some consistency in the punishment for people that abuse animals.Yesterday I read an article about a teenage girl that got 1 year of jail time for... more
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The search for what causes a debilitating shell disease affecting lobsters from Long Island Sound to Maine has led one Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) visiting scientist to suspect environmental alkyphenols, formed primarily by the breakdown of hard transparent plastics.
Preliminary evidence from the lab of Hans Laufer suggests that certain concentrations of alkyphenols may be interfering with the ability of lobsters to develop tough shells. Instead, the shells are weakened, leaving affected lobsters susceptible to the microbial invasions characteristic of the illness.
"Lobsters 'know' when their shell is damaged, and that's probably the reason when they have shell disease, why they molt more quickly," says Laufer, a visiting investigator at the MBL for over 20 years and professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut. "But ultimately, they still come down with the disease. And we think the presence of alkyphenols contributes to that."
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Yet, how many plastic bottles and other plastic items will wind up in our waterways today alone? Our convenience and apathy are poisoning the Earth and those species who live on it, including ourselves. Not very bright.The search for what causes a debilitating shell disease affecting lobsters from Long... more
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