Blistering barnacles! The US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been busy with the fishies. NOAA has announced which states will be eligible for aid money to help recover from various natural disasters that befell the country recently.

These include: $47 million for fisheries in Louisiana and Texas damaged by hurricanes Ike and Gustav; $20 million for watermen in Maryland and Virginia who have suffered from a decline in soft shell blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay; $5 million for Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire to look more closely at what happened when a red tide of algae hit their coastline, killing off loads of shellfish; and finally, $2 million for fishermen in the Puget Sound, including severel northwest Indian tribes, who have been hit by declining sockeye salmon stocks.

Out of all these, the $5 million to help victims of the red tide algal blooms in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire is the only one picked up so far (Boston Herald, Boston Globe)

As well as all that fishy help, NOAA also just offered its first Biological Opinion to the Environmental Protection Agency about how pesticides affect fish. This is the first in a series that will be released between now and February 2012. NOAA looked at diazonin, malathion, and chlorpyrifos and said that they were likely to affect 27 salmon populations on the West coast of the US, and that buffer zones should be introduced to protect them. Some papers are reporting this as a new EPA ruling, but nothing is likely to happen for a while. (Guardian, AP , which has a quote from NOAA employee Jim Lecky uttering the word “gazillion”). The EPA was told to ask for this information from NOAA as a result of a lawsuit brought against the agency by environmental groups.

Image: Sockeye Salmon, by NOAA/USFWS