Offshore Oil Exploration and a Silent Ocean

Fish to another fish: "I see food, I eat food...unless it is marked incorrectly. Let me check the label [its colorings and markings]. This one is edible." Another fish: This tastes funky! Blechhh! The manufacturer labeling didn't say there was crude oil and arsenic in it." Minutes later, the fish keels over from food poisoning before reaching the doctor.

There's a purpose for the colorings and markings on fish and sea creatures. Fish and other sea creatures could get eaten by the wrong fish or sea creature in general if they were the wrong colors or had the wrong markings. This would result in poisoning to the fish that ate it, or the complete genetic alteration of an entire species. With the undersea contaminants, if the wrong fish were eaten, the poisonous contaminants would travel the wrong way through the food chain, and poison larger sea creatures.

How this affects humans is that if one fish consistently eats the wrong food, ingesting all its toxins, and a human being eats it, humans are poisoned by this fish, and their family grieves over their death, and the important tasks that they do on earth that no one else can do (besides work) go unattended to. Maybe they were raising children. No one else can perfectly substitute for this job. And it could be all because one species of fish ate the wrong food. It also affects humanity in that ocean balance always affects what human beings are doing, and what the weather does.

Some people make fun of those who say "Save the whales," but this is the time where it could get catastrophic if we don't. Each creature has its purpose and its own particular food to eat. If there were no sea creatures the sea would be a toxic mineral dump with mineral crystal structures growing in it, along with old whale poop, coral with acid eating into it, fish skeletons and decaying whale carcasses. With all of the toxic waste, a once beautiful ocean would become a broken and unfixable filtering system that accepted all the toxins from all the rivers and could not turn them into something useful or hide them at the bottom. A dying ocean would probably have water that smelled like sulfur or ammonia, the fish poop and whale urine levels would be becoming toxic, there would be poisonous remaints of sea creatures gone extinct, along with the toxic elements they consumed.

If the earth lasted without a functional ocean, thousands of years later, no one would be brave enough to excavate the remains of "ancient" whale bones to determine what weird creatures lived during the short time of the oil exploration. Either the planet would cease to carry life on it, because the weather would become inhospitable, or a vast portion of the planet would become uninhabitable. Rachel Carson, a famous environmentalist, wrote "Silent Spring." Just what the planet contained a silent ocean? Or worse, none at all?