Jubilee

Oil and Methane Causing Sea Life to Attempt Escaping Water

BP Plc’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may be exacerbating a natural phenomenon that causes fish, crabs, eels and shrimp to swarm the shoreline to escape oxygen-depleted sea waters.

Called “jubilees” by locals because of the opportunity to scoop up seafood in buckets, they typically appear during the summer along the Gulf Coast. This year, scientists say jubilees have occurred in open water for the first time, raising concern that low-oxygen areas are expanding because of the more than 4 million barrels of oil BP’s Macondo well leaked into the Gulf.

Low oxygen in the water because of oil and methane from the BP spill contributed to a “jubilee-like effect” in late June off the coast of Fort Morgan, Alabama, at the mouth of Mobile Bay, Monty Graham, a senior marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, said in a telephone interview. Catfish, shrimp, crab and flounder piled up along an offshore sandbar, until the sharks moved in, Graham, 45, said.

How can something called a jubilee possibly be anything but a good thing? When it involves BP's oil disaster. Let me get this straight -- the oil and methane release is causing oxygen levels in the water to drop so low that creatures which can live only in water are jumping onto the beaches, out of the water, in order to try not to asphyxiate? But BP and Soetorobama say there never was a problem, certainly not a disaster, and that minor problem has been solved, so vote for your Dimocrats in November.

Barry ate a fish taco during his brief visit to the Gulf but he brought all his food and his chefs with him. He went swimming with his daughter but only the Secret Service and a Red House photographer were allowed to accompany them, they did not swim in the actual Gulf but in a protected bay into which no Gulf water flows, but which instead feeds water out into the Gulf from rivers. And since only one picture was released showing Soetoro and his offspring in clear blue water, while the water in that bay is greenish and somewhat opaque due to algal blooms, there is much doubt that he even swam anywhere other than in a swimming pool with fresh, treated water.

One bit of advice to the people in the Gulf states who might be tempted to collect the bounty of fish that are washing up on shore during this jubilee -- stay away, as far away as possible. Those fish are poisoned and will poison you. But the economy, destroyed by design even before April 20 and damaged to an even greater extent after, will probably prompt some poor souls who can no longer afford to eat to collect and cook these fish. In my opinion, BP will be responsible for their sicknesses and even deaths just as they are responsible for the manslaughter of the 11 men killed aboard Deepwater Horizon. They must pay.