Did BP use dispersants to cover the level of their contamination?

he said the contaminants -- which could eventually be pushed onto the continental shelf before shifting slowly down toward the Florida Keys and possibly out to the open Atlantic Ocean -- raised troubling questions about whether they would "cascade up the food web."

The threat is that they will poison plankton and fish larvae before making their way into animals higher up the food chain, Hollander said.

SHOOT: I wouldn't put it past BP - their eagerness to use dispersants may have been more to do with hiding or cloaking the degree of oil contamination - to make it less obvious - than a conscientious effort to protect the environment. Shouldn't the oil be controlled and contained, kept in one continuous glob, as far as possible?

clipped from news.yahoo.com MIAMI (Reuters) – A large undersea cloud of dissolved hydrocarbons discovered last week near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill raises fresh questions about toxic chemicals used to fight the spill and their environmental impact. David Hollander, a University of South Florida oceanographer, headed a research team that discovered the six-mile (10-km) wide "oil cloud" while on a government-funded expedition aboard the Weatherbird II, a vessel operated by the university's College of Marine Science. "We were collecting samples down to two miles below the surface," Hollander told Reuters in an interview on Friday. Hollander said scientists had yet to determine whether the dissolved hydrocarbons, found in oxygen-depleted waters, were the result of chemical dispersants used deep below the Gulf surface to break down oil from the leaking well.