Hog farms likely culprit as millions of North Carolina fish decimated

[ensho]

http://www.alexandracousteau.org/field/expedition-blog/hog-farms-likely-culprit-millions-north-carolina-fish-decimated?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook


Fish on the Neuse River go belly-up by the millions. Local environmentalists decry industrial hog farms


Something is very wrong with the Neuse River. This much its riverkeepers know.

Last year, so many menhaden fish died that they washed up on the shores of North Carolina's largest river like sea foam. The stench was so bad that residents packed up their homes and checked into hotels. All told over 100 million menhaden fish died across 42 days. And that count only tallied belly-up fish, not ones that sunk to the river bottom.

“I did get calls from scuba divers who clean the hulls of boats, reporting dead fish on the bottom three to five inches deep,” says Larry Baldwin, Neuse Riverkeeper in New Bern, North Carolina. “The fish kill was nasty,” he shakes his head as if to free it of the memory.

-snip-

“The largest fish kill to occur on any river in North America took place on New Bern, North Carolina and in less then five days a billion fish had perished,” says Dove, who was the Neuse Riverkeeper at the time of the fish kill in 1991. The fish all had open sores on them. People go them too. Some fishermen suffered memory loss from the mysterious toxin that was in the river water.

Several years later JoAnn Burkholder, an aquatic botanist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina discovered the likely guilty party, a dinoflagellate called Pfiesteria piscicida that flourished in the nutrient-rich waters of the river thanks to the putrid effluent from North Carolina’s pig farms that is stored in open cesspools.

“At a thousand feet in an airplane you can count one hundred cesspools, some larger than two football fields,” describes Dove, his eyebrows raised to meet my reaction.
-snip-
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there are pics

the Neuse used to be a beautiful, bountiful river. hog barons didn't care. barons care about money.

[BeFree]

1. "That smells like money"

Seems the NC Environmental Protection Agency is a failure?

[ensho]

4. good question - have pockets been filled?

nt

[flvegan]

2. But bacon tastes good.

So fuck those people, the fish, that river...

:hide:

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. When will people demand this stop

[G_j]

5. factory farming is evil ...eom

[madrchsod]

6. the neuse river spill....

the laboratory researchers who investigated the spill became ill from the mist that came off the rinsing of the tanks that held the infected fish.

[ensho]

7. jeez - what a toxic mess

did he survive?

[madrchsod]

8. yes