rebecca LANDO

sexartandpolitics:

Photo: Billy Nungesser/WWL

unburyingthelead:

Instant icon: a photo of Biblical power that defines a generation

What you see above isn’t a rural gravel road. It’s a Louisiana waterway, its surface completely covered with dead sea life — a mishmash of species of fish, crabs, stingray and eel. New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL-TV reports that even a whale was found dead in the area.

Fish kills are fairly common along the Gulf Coast, particularly during the summer in the area near the mouth of the Mississippi, the site of this kill. The area is rife with dead zones — stretches where sudden oxygen depletion can cause widespread death. But those kills tend to be limited to a single species of fish, rather than the broad sort of die-off involved in this kill.

And therein lies the concern of Gulf residents, who suspect this may be yet another side effect of the catastrophic BP oil spill.

Woah.

This happens on my family’s side of the Gulf Coast (the Sarasota Bay and the stretch of the Gulf from Tampa to Naples). Our fish kills are the result of pollution-aggravated Red Tide: a red algae that chokes the water’s oxygen and turns the Gulf a brackish red color. On some years, it’s been so bad that you can’t go within a mile or two of the beach because of the smell of the rotten tide and the sight of the carcass-clogged sands.