Famous Potatoes

Louisiana may have to look for a new slogan. Sportsman's Paradise refers to the abundant fishing and hunting provided for in the Gulf coast wetlands. This is a vast, varied and abundant area and it may well recover from this oil + dispersant disaster sooner than I think. As it stands we are flooding paradise with poison and creating hell on earth.

It's all about the fish eggs. Nature is not always efficient. Fish don't make babies one at a time. They put out millions of eggs and squirt loads of sperm all over the area and leave, confident that the next generation will be. And it works. Most of this rich biomass gets eaten by something else, and even most of the hatchlings get gobbled up too. The strategy is to start out with so many that enough survive to do it all over again. And everybody else gets fed in the meantime. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, this includes just about every duck from Argentina to Alaska. It became known as the Sportsman's Paradise because people like to come here and shoot stuff. Some of these shooters have been alcoholic yahoos, but John James Audubon lived here for years and did his most important work here, while shooting tens of thousands of birds.

This scheme has worked pretty well for millions of years. Now we're going to see how much poison the fish nursery can tolerate.