Russian Scallops to Keep Eye On Pollution

Scallop

A huge garden of sea scallops will be completed by the end of the month in the Far East Kozmino Bay in Russia. This will be the first time in the history of Russia, and possibly the world, where mollusks will be used as an instrument to monitor the water.

“Scallops are a very good measure of water pollution because they are very sensitive to contaminants. They absorb and retain impurities” explains the organic chemist at the helm of Kozmino’s ecological safety department, Natalia Vykhodtseva.

She continued by commenting that sea scallops are rather adept at filtering out different contaminants, especially oil and heavy metals, and this is the reason they are being used to monitor the health of the bay.
“If the monitoring is successful, we have an idea to create large permanent colonies for scallops, mussels and seaweed at the bottom of the bay and use them to filter the water and keep it clean,” added Vykhodtseva.

This “Sea Scallop Garden” is the brain child of the Russian oil company Transneft. It’s nice to sea that the oil companies are taking an interest, and becoming part of the solution rather than continuing to be part of the problem.

Of course, the reason for Transneft’s concern is the fact that it plans to heavily traffic the area, to the tune of 200 million barrels of oil, so of course people are concerned about pollution.

This is the first time an oil company has showed any concern, but then, they don’t really have a choice, ever since the BP oil fiasco, and the other spills over the past years…