Eyeless Shrimp, Mutant Fish, Clawless Crabs: Courtesy of the BP Oil Spill

These eyeless shrimp even lack eye sockets. Photo courtesy: Youtube/screen capture

Last September, a fisherman pulled nearly 400 pounds of mutated, eyeless shrimp out of the Gulf of Mexico. That was shocking and unusual. But because the media seems to feel that nobody's interested the aftermath of the 2010 BP spill, the biggest offshore oil disaster in US history, you probably didn't hear about it. I know I didn't.

Since then, we've seen a similar tale play out: more mutated shrimp. More deformed shellfish. More fish with repulsive-looking lesions stretching across their scales.

Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs "with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they've been dead for a week".

Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.

"We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills."

Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was "ten per cent what it normally is".

Federal agencies are mum as to what's causing the deformities, but a number of researchers and locals, mustering all of the common sense they've got, think they've uncovered a suspect. I won't give it away, but here's a hint: it spewed 4.9 million gallons of crude into the Gulf ecosystem.



Now, this Al Jazeera video segment is a few months old, but ever since I saw these epic high-res photos of the rig exploding, I've been poking around the detritus of the media's seriously lacking spill coverage a little more closely. This one never made it onto Treehugger, and it's a report everyone should see.

BP refused Al Jazeera's request to comment on this issue for a television interview, but provided a statement that read:

"Seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is among the most tested in the world, and, according to the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), it is as safe now as it was before the accident."

And if you believe this, I have a bridge I'll like to sell you.

It's a stark reminder that all is not returning to normal in the Gulf, despite what BP's media team would like to believe—the book is still opening on the kind of ecological damage the region will suffer in the long tail of the oily catastrophe.

Three-Eyed Fish Caught Near Argentine Power Plant

Photo courtesy: infobae.com

Way back in 1990, an episode of The Simpsons, a wildly-popular cartoon in N. America, introduced Blinky, a mutated orange fish with three-eyes caught in the waters near the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, emblematic of mean Mr. Burns' callousness towards the environment -- and now, it seems, life has imitated cartoon. Recently, a group of fisherman on a lake in the Cordoba province of Argentina reeled in a fish that had an extra eye. And it just so happens that the lake this three-eyed fish was caught in is situated right next to a nuclear power plant, too.

According to Infobae.com, the lake where the three-eyed fish was caught is a reservoir where hot water from the nuclear facility is pumped, and that folks living nearby have started to grow worried after seeing undeniable evidence of mutation. Never had such a fish been seen there before.

"We were fishing and we got the surprise of getting this rare specimen. As it was dark at that time we did not notice, but then you looked at him with a flashlight and saw that he had a third eye," said fisherman Julian Zmutt of his unusual discovery.

Considering the ecological ramifications, and threat of widespread disaster, posed by nuclear power plants, it's no wonder that they seem far less of a viable option to fullfil the world's energy needs as does renewable sources like wind and solar. But of course, we've known that for a while.

Perhaps where a bit of foresight failed, three-sight will prevail.