It has been 6 months and 2 weeks since the BP oil spill fiasco in the Gulf Of Mexico, due to an oil rig explosion.

Even though the fiasco is being steadily swept under the carpet, and media coverage is dropping off quickly, the actual impact the fiasco has had is very much still on the minds of researchers and scientists.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about the actual impact BP’s blunder has had on the environment. These questions include: Where has the oil gone? ; What impact will it have on fisheries? ; What are the long term implications? And other such questions are all being delved into, even as this article is being written.

A leading goup of scientists working around the clock to get to the bottom of such things can be found at USM’s Gulf Coast Research Lab in Ocean Springs.

In fact, some of the answers may lie within some enormous, colorful crabs which make their home in the deep, dark waters, of the Gulf of Mexico.

Harriet Perry, a researcher with the team, has been studying these crabs since the 1980’s.

You see, the crabs are being tested for the presence of oil and dispersant as well as any other chemicals that BP may have inadvertently left behind after their little mishap this past summer.

Well, it’s good to see someone still gives a hoot as to what happens out there in the gulf, but with dwindling interest, it will only be a matter of time until the whole thing becomes nothing more than an idle stormy day story…

Four new species of King crab has been discovered in the Smithsonian Collections of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

Lithodes galapagensis – Picture by NOCS

The four species have been formally described by Sally Hall, a PhD student at the University of Southampton* who discovered the species in the museum. All four hail from the deep sea but from very different parts of the globe. Paralomis nivosa is native to Philippine waters, Paralomis makarovi comes from the cold Bering Sea, Paralomis alcockiana lives off the coast of South Carolina, USA, and Lithodes galapagensis is the only king crab ever recorded from the Galapagos archipelago.

“King crabs include some of the largest crustaceans currently inhabiting Earth and are fished by humans, particularly from the shallower waters of the polar regions”, Hall explained. “The new discoveries increase the total number of king crab species known to 113.”

Hall believes that even more species of King crab will be found in the future.
“The oceans off eastern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean are all particularly poorly sampled,” she said. “We need to know which king crab species live where before we can fully understand their ecology and evolutionary success.”

* The University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES) at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS)

Tens of thousands of crab pots litter the ocean floor, forming lethal obstacle courses of plastic lines and weighed-down metal cylinders. Lost crab pots are responsible for killing a long row of air breathing ocean dwellers, such as whales, sea lions and turtles. In addition to their effect on marine wildlife, stray crab pots also inflict costly and potentially dangerous damage to passing vessels.

The basic type of crab pot is a squat cylinder consisting of steel mesh and rubber, and with heavy iron that helps it sink to the bottom. Fishermen lose track of their crab pots due to various reasons, including storms, tousling kelp banks, and passing motor vessels that snaps of the line between the pot and the buoy.

In the past five years, two dead whales have washed up on the Oregon Coast entangled in the fatal combination of metallic pots and durable synthetic lines, but a federal stimulus grant of $700,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has now been assigned to pay Oregon fishermen for cleaning up their crab pots – or at least a fraction of them.

As the crab season ends in August, the federal money will be used to charter 10 boats and hire 48 people — including the 31 fishermen who make winning bids. The aim is to recover 4,000 pots over two seasons.

Each year, Oregon fishermen lose 10 percent of the 150,000 pots they put out, according to a statement from Cyreis Schmitt, marine policy project leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Specimens of the invasive Blue catfish (Ictalurus furcatus) have now grown large enough to reach the top of the food chain in James River, Virginia. A catfish weighing 102 lbs (46 kg) was caught from the river not long ago; the largest caught freshwater fish ever to be reported from Virginian waters.

30 years ago, Blue catfish was deliberately introduced to this U.S. river as a game fish. During recent years, the catfish population has grown explosively while many other fish species have decreased. An eight year old Blue catfish normally weigh a mere 4 lbs (1.8 kg), but as soon as it gets large enough to start catching other fish and devouring fully grown crabs, it begins putting on weight at a rapid pace and can gain as much as 10 lbs (4.5 kg) a year.

Blue Catfish – Ictalurus furcatus. Copyright www.jjphoto.dk

According to Bob Greenlee, a biologist with the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, scientists doing sampling used to get around 1,500 catfish in an hour in this river in the 1990s. Today, this number has increased to 6,000. “We have an invasive species that is taking over the ecosystem,” says Rob Latour, a marine biologist with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William and Mary.