Marine Life and Toxins

It rained half the weekend and we watched a lot of nature shows. PBS had some shows that included dolphins, Orcas and Horseshoe crabs. It seems that while the crabs are virtually unchanged in 350 million years, their blood is a super antibiotic! There numbers were decreasing since they were being used as bait, but now they are caught and "milked" of their blood which goes for $15,000 per quart. Most interesting, is that these crabs have blood that is copper based (as opposed to iron like ours)! For those Trekkies out there, you might remember that Mr. Spock had copper based blood!

There were also shows by Guy Harvey and Jean-Michel Cousteau about dolphins, Orcas and salmon farming. Apparently PCB's and flame retardant chemicals are concentrating in the fat cells of these animals to dangerous levels. The Cousteau team had their blood tested and these chemicals were found in all of them (even those who were vegetarian) as well.

In the dolphins and whales, the females had less toxins. It is thought that since the chemicals are fat soluble, the females transfer them to their offspring while nursing. The young have a high mortality rate and so do the males.

Also touched on, was the salmon farms that take huge amounts of fish from the ocean to feed their stock. These fish farms also spread disease and the meat produced has as much as 10X the toxins as wild caught salmon.

Bottom-line, don't eat farmed salmon and work to eliminate industrial chemicals from leaching into the environment. Our very lives may depend on it.

Oh yeah... in light of this, I'd like to "thank" the Bush administration for rolling back environmental restrictions during the eight years they were in office...