By Matthew
Lewis
HARTFORD,
Conn. (Reuters) - Connecticut will spend $3.5 million to study
the die-off of lobsters in Long Island Sound that many fishermen
mistakenly blame on pesticides used to stop the West Nile virus,
the state's environmental chief said.
``Our hope
is to make the decision (on how to spend the money) before the
first of the year, so we can get research started with the spring
semester at colleges and universities,'' said Arthur Rocque, commissioner
of the state Department of Environmental Protection.
The lobster
population in Long Island Sound's western basin -- from New York
City to Bridgeport, Connecticut -- has been devastated, Rocque
told Reuters in an interview.
``There are
virtually no commercially marketable lobsters being caught (in
that area),'' he said Thursday.
Long Island
Sound is a 90-mile-long (145-km) arm of the Atlantic Ocean between
Connecticut and Long Island, New York. It was traditionally the
third-biggest U.S. lobster market, behind Maine and Massachusetts.
``In the middle
or central Sound area, roughly off New Haven and Branford (Connecticut),
they're having record catches,'' Rocque said. ``And the eastern
part of the state remains relatively unchanged over last year.''
West Nile
Connection Denied
He said the
die-off was caused by a parasite, though many of the state's 300
lobstermen strongly disagree and blame Connecticut's use of pesticides
to kill mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus.
``It's a parasitic
organism that attacks the central nervous system of the lobsters,''
Rocque said. ``It's present in lobster populations routinely,
but it usually is not of epidemic proportions, and it's usually
not fatal.''
``For some
reason, in the last couple of years, in the western basin of Long
Island sound, it has been fatal,'' he said. ``So the question
is: what caused it to become fatal? Was it an outside factor,
was it population dynamics, water temperature, the combination
of a bunch of things? That's what the research is all about.''
Rocque said
the mosquito pesticide is not the culprit because ``the lobsters
started dying about three months before any spraying was done.
So unless they anticipated the spraying and died of anxiety, I
don't think that's going to be a very fruitful avenue of research.''
West Nile
virus is a mosquito-borne illness that for the second year in
a row has sickened people and killed birds in New England and
the mid-Atlantic states.
The virus,
which causes a form of encephalitis, killed seven people in 1999
in the United States, all in the Queens section of New York. An
82-year-old New Jersey man is the only U.S. fatality so far this
year.
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