As John Lamkin, a fisheries biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, put it: “Any larvae that came into contact with the oil doesn’t have a chance.”5 Unlike the oil-coated pelicans and sea turtles, which were being featured on the covers of the world’s newspapers that week, these deaths would attract no media attention, just as they would go uncounted in the official assessments of the spill’s damage. Indeed, if a certain species of larva was in the process of being snuffed out, we would likely not find out about it for years—until those embryonic life-forms would
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