Ever since fishermen in the Gulf started retiring their fishing nets and looking forlornly at the oil creeping to their beaches, great efforts have been made to assuage the fishing industry and assure America that the fish supply, despite expectations, is safe to eat.
President Obama made a public announcement about fish safety. Vice President Joe Biden promised a new federal effort to ensure the right measures are taken to regulate what's okay to eat, and what's not.
But just like, well... everything else related to the oil spill, the problem's not going away.
Droplets of oil are now showing up in the larvae of crabs, according to scientists from the University of Southern Mississippi and Tulane University in New Orleans.
That's bad news for obvious, flavor-related reasons. It's also a sign that oil can, and will, travel up the food chain.
Harriet Perry, who has studied the blue crab for 42 years, told the McClatchy paper that she has never seen anything like this. Perry is the director of the Center for Fisheries Research and Development at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory. She said the oil is sure to enter the food chain in a number of ways:
"Fish are going to feed on [crab larvae]. We have also just started seeing it on the fins of small, larval fish—their fins were encased in oil. That limits their mobility, so that makes them easy prey for other species."
Up, up, up the food chain the oil climbs.
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