BP Spill: Eyeless Shrimp and Clawless Crabs Popping Up In the Water

Two years later, the BP spill is effecting your food

Don't be surprised the next time you go to a seafood restaurant and see "clawless crab" on the menu. Because thanks to the BP spill, you just might have that option.

Two years after the disaster that pumped 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the expected deformed animals are starting to pop up.

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Fishermen have complained of eyeless shrimp, clawless crabs and fish with legions on their scales. Talk about the catch of the day.

Al Jazeera reports:

“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” [Louisiana commercial fisher Tracy] Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.” [...]

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

BP has long claimed to be investigating such reports, and even claimed that the waters are now clean. 

[Also Read: BP Reaches Settlement]