oil in the food chain

• Bacteria eat by chemically converting their food source, like crude oil.
• Zooplankton are carnivorous plankton that eat bacteria, other plankton, algae and detrius.
• Oysters are filter feeders. They pump water in, strain out the plankton and pump it back out again at the rate of about a gallon per hour.
• Shrimp are scavengers. They walk around the ocean floor eating dead plankton, dead fish and dead plants.
• Almost all fish eat shrimp, or eat the fish that ate the shrimp.

So if you eat fish, shrimp or oysters, you are also eating the plankton they ate, and by extension, the bacteria the plankton ate. And those bacteria ate the oil spilled from the Macondo well. So that’s how oil from the BP spill can get into you.