BP oil spill made worse by dispersents

Something has long bugged me about the use of dispersents to help "clean" the BP oil spill in the gulf. Dispersents are toxic chemicals that act sort of like laundry detergents - they cling to oil particles and break floating oil slicks down into much smaller pieces. This can be good because it can be easier for the few types of microbes that feed on hydrocarbons to break them down, but it can also be bad because now these little blebs of harder-to-see oil and dispersent have an easier time entering into living systems (via gills, lungs, direct ingestion, and absorption through skin or scales).

An EPA whistleblower has charged BP with fighting the economic aspects of the spill (keeping oil off beaches) but ignoring and in fact drastically increasing the ecological damage of the spill. What does this mean for you and I? It means no Gulf crawfish or shrimp etouffee for the next decade, sadly.