New Batfish Species Found Under Gulf Oil Spill

eDarwin writes "Researchers have discovered two previously unknown species of bottom-dwelling fish in the Gulf of Mexico, living right in the area affected by the BP oil spill. Researchers identified new species of pancake batfishes, a flat fish rarely seen because of the dark depths they favor. They are named for the clumsy way they 'walk' along the sea bottom, like a bat crawling."

Comments

They don't walk any more

[Anonymous Coward]

They kind of glide across the surface now.

Correlation v. Causation

[girlintraining]

They're ugly, look crippled, and found in only one place in the world -- an oil spill.

Gentlemen, to your conspiracies!

And the old saw applies here

[dkleinsc]

What's the difference between a pancake batfish and Tony Hayward?

One's a scum-sucking bottom-feeder, and the other's a fish.

Re:And the old saw applies here

[Sponge Bath]

I mean seriously, what did this guy do or fail to do?

Lead and instill a culture of safety and accountability in a company with a history of dangerous cost cutting.

Re:And the old saw applies here

[Bakkster]

I mean seriously, what did this guy do or fail to do?

Lead and instill a culture of safety and accountability in a company with a history of dangerous cost cutting.

He also produced some of the most incredible PR gaffes in recent memory. It's easy to hate someone when they're wholly unlikeable.

Re:And the old saw applies here

[mswhippingboy]

what did this guy do or fail to do?

How about spending a tiny bit of the $5.5B in profits each quarter on R&D for oil spill containment and cleanup? I guess that would have been too much to ask.

Re:And the old saw applies here

[Dahamma]

I followed the timeline and they already had like 5 different things to try within days of it happening.

That is just plain untrue.

April 22 - The Deepwater Horizon rig, valued at more than $560 million, sinks and a 5-mile-long (8 km) oil slick forms.
April 25 - Efforts to activate the well's blowout preventer fail. [It took them THREE DAYS to realize they had completely forgotten to maintain the main component intended to prevent the blowout]
May 7 - An attempt to place a containment dome over the spewing well fails when the device is rendered useless by frozen hydrocarbons that clogged it [this was not days later, it was over TWO WEEKS LATER]
May 16 - BP inserts a tube into the leaking riser pile of the well and captures some oil and gas.
May 26 - A "top kill" maneuver starts, involving pumping heavy fluids and other material into the well shaft to try to stifle the flow. [Already over a month later!]
June 2 - BP tries another capping strategy but has difficulty cutting off a leaking riser pipe. [etc]

So "within days" they had done one thing, which is to try to manually activate a device that didn't automatically activate because it "had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a "useless" test version of a key component and a cutting tool that wasn't strong enough to shear through steel joints in the well pipe and stop the flow of oil.".

Wow, yeah, sounds like they sure spent big bucks on R&D and maintenance there...

Re:And the old saw applies here

[RSCruiser]

Of course drilling in shallower water is safer. The problem is we've already exhausted a large number of those reserves, forcing deep water drilling.

The reason they had 5 different things to try so quickly is because they were all tried way back during the Ixtoc spill. The ideas weren't new. The problems arise when you consider they're now under a mile of water instead of a few hundred feet.

Its a fairly safe assumption that BP (and other companies) have spent nothing on containment research given the rehashing of Ixtoc containment and the on-the-fly engineering that has happened since the spill started.

Re:And the old saw applies here

[ultranova]

while he is responsible for the pressure that eventually trickled down the management chain resulting in the cost-cutting measures leading to the spill, he bears no personal responsibility

This, here, is the problem with capitalism.

Re:And the old saw applies here

[MachineShedFred]

Oh, you mean all the same things they tried with Ixtoc I, 30 years ago, which also didn't work then?

Yeah, that's some real R&D there. Well done.

Re:And the old saw applies here

[SkunkPussy]

Couldn't the limited liability of a corporation be insurance sold by banks, instead of as a cost implicitly underwritten by society?

Re:And the old saw applies here

[Dahamma]

5 attempts, no matter how "massive", that fail miserably is in no way impressive to me. No points for effort here, this isn't Kindergarten.

And becomes even less impressive when the ridiculous estimates of 2000-5000 barrels per day leaking were later updated to 60,000-100,000 bpd (and those were really only changed when the majority of non-partisan scientists examining the data pointed out how ridiculous they were... so believe the new "official" estimate with a grain of salt...)

Re:And the old saw applies here

[bm_luethke]

No, it has *nothing* to do with capitalism. There are socialist, communist, and any other economic system around that doesn't hold business owners responsible for what their employees do and there are capitalistic ones that do. Even in full command type economies there *has* to be some type of concentration of wealth or power - you at the least have the govt chairmanships that direct policy for the state run factories (and try and hold them responsible - I expect you will get BP execs held responsible, win the lottery, and discover an immortality potion before you get a govt agency to decide to hold itself responsible for its own actions). If you want economies of scale to kick in - and I assure you that you do - then the question isn't if something like BP will exist it is who has control of it. A little mom & pop isn't going to run an offshore deep water oil rig no matter what and industry of that scale exists in nearly every sector (a small local team isn't going to produce whatever the current generation of Intel chips is when someone reads this - or whatever company is currently on top of the world market).

What this is a failure of is a failure of our government. We have regulations in place that would have (maybe - can't truly see alternate time lines but this type of thing is *not* unknown and we can trace the chain of failures) prevented it from being a true disaster. They were ignored from every level you can point at and in many cases still are 70+ days later (not sure the current count) - nor can you pin it on any political group (more than just our two main ones involved too) or any specific president (Obama failed miserably on initial reaction and on his now long term response - Obama has made Bush with Katrina look highly competent).

The problem is that as we get to where in order to advance you have to have not just multi-billion but *multi-trillion* dollar budgets for some advances then there is just so much money/power floating around that it draws corruption to a point that I can't really come up with a good analogy. Given the corruption we have seen with our own regulators (with drugs and prostitutes) and the ineptitude of all levels of govt to respond to this what would a command market have done better? Indeed, the fact that this is hurting their stock and end user sales has done more to spur them than *anything* the govt has done or will ever do. They aren't going to bite the hand that feeds them and look to how whom they donate too, whom is in power, and whom gets elected correlates to see how buyable most politicians are.

While we can certainly point to fairly socialistic countries that do things Right - say the Dutch - it isn't because they are tending socialistic. Indeed, a stronger govt presence and control would have been *worse* in our case - as bad as BP has done our govt has done worse (and I say that is true for the last few decades too, and that is *all* branches of the govt). I can also point to China and the old Soviets for examples of more socialistic countries that are as bad or worse than us. It is more rot at our core and that rot stems more from our concentration of wealth. That concentration of wealth is not so much from being capitalistic as much as it from necessity. While the Dutch have chosen their niche to be world expert on even there they have a concentration of wealth that will most likely one day rot. For world super powers (while we do not list China as one today it is almost there) you are going to have several. The Dutch aren't going to have globally competitive space exploration, deep sea exploration, energy research, computing research, and pretty much globally competitive (say top five) in hundreds of fields. There are only a few countries with the wealth (and by that I mean raw resources) and they *all* suffer (or in the case of the old soviets used too) from the same thing.

In the end I personally think it is more that human nature is such that we will have trouble progressing past a certain point - or at least it is going to be a l

Re:Batfish?

[unix1]

Hmmmm.....how do they taste, breaded and fried?

Oily.

New (Soon to be Extinct) Species Found...

[tekrat]

There, fixed that for you...

Re:Well they did live there

[locallyunscene]

aaaaaand it's gone.

Re:FTA:

[SheeEttin]

Well, a gallon is ~3.79 liters (according to Google), so if there's "millions of gallons", I'd say it's pretty safe to assume there are "millions of liters" as well...

Re:FTA:

[RobertB-DC]

"The well has pumped millions of gallons (liters) of oil into the Gulf"

uh... one of those things is not like the other... I question the validity of any site that thinks gallons and liters are interchangable

You would prefer, then, that the article said "The well has pumped millions of gallons (3,785,411.78's of liters) of oil into the Gulf"? Perhaps a review of the concept of False Precision is in order. "A guard at a museum says a dinosaur skeleton is 70 million and six years old. He reasons that it was 70 million years old when he started working there six years ago."

Clean them

[gmuslera]

After removing all the oil will be easy to see that are part of the already known brucewaynefish species.

Re:Hmmm

[PsychoSlashDot]

This was news like 2-3 weeks ago

You know what? That fact has absolutely no importance and never has. Let's see why.

First, there are two types of news: things that are interesting and things that are important. Things that are important threaten my life or my lifestyle, or those around me. I need to react, and react quickly. This story isn't in that category, and most of what's posted on Slashdot aren't. I don't come here for urgent breaking-news issues, and I shouldn't. On the other hand, things that are interesting generally remain interesting for more than a few moments. The discovery of a new (and interesting) species of fish is an interesting bit of trivia that won't be any less interesting if I read about it today, tomorrow, or a month from now. It's timeless news.

Secondly, it's very hard for the administrators to know how many readers have heard about a particular story yet. They filter through submissions and make decisions based on how interesting a story is. Thing is... I hadn't heard about this anywhere else in the last two to three weeks. If Slashdot hadn't accepted this submission and posted it, I wouldn't have heard about it. Which says that at least in this case - in my case - this acceptance worked exactly as desired. If you already heard about this, feel free to ignore the story.

Third and finally, you imply that because this news isn't 0-day it's not news. What's the threshold? 0-day? 0-minute? Who are you to decide when information is no longer "fresh" enough to merit further dissemination. I'll agree that posting a story announcing the exciting new 80486 processor would be inappropriate but you're quibbling about a few weeks in a story about a new-to-us species of fish.

You should have tried to make a fished p0st instead of complaining about this.