Why do they still dye the rivers green for St. Patricks Day? It's not a good look for downtown Chicago.
Blackout@kbin.run to 
I just think the novelty of these type of displays was up in the 90s, It's time for an upgrayedd. I propose leprechauns flying up and down the river wearing water jet packs, shooting people with their Chicago-style hot dog cannons would be more with the times. What's your idea?
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I don't care so much about the novelty. I want to know what impacts this has on the environment.
I assume it's been studied to be non-toxic for fish. Or at least I hope it has. But what about other effects it might have? Does it significantly reduce visibility and impact the ecosystem in that way? Some other effects?
Pretty sure you can eat Fluorescein with no ill effects other than turning your piss dayglo. It's very widely used as a 'non-toxic' tracer dye so I'd imagine studies have been done.
Have they done studies on this scale? Probably. But still a valid question. If nothing else it kind of desensitizes us to pouring green sludge into rivers. Fuck do I know, I'd be freaked out if I was a fish. I'd also eat a incandescent neon green fish, but that's on the fish.
They do it at scale once a year.
Doing something isn't the same as studying it, though. If I were to eat a few litres of ice-cream that's not a study on the effects of excessive ice-cream consumption, that's just someone eating an unhealthy amount of ice-cream. People do stupid things all the time with the excuse that that's how it's always been done.
True but if they want an opportunity to study the effects, there it is.
Effects includea nausea, loss of motor control, and vomiting. And singing. But mainly vomiting.
Metric or imperial?
Orange sludge!
That too, whatever ain't blue, gray, or poop colored doesn't belong in the river.
Honestly this is the thing I'm most worried about. I have little doubt that it's been studied to be non-toxic. I said as much in my first comment. I'm more worried about more-difficult-to-study effects like on the behaviour of the fish.
I mean there's too few of them left to make a good sample size anyway so fuck it let's dye the river like it's potato famine o clock
This stuff is regularly used to mark water flows that someone wants to trace, for example when a stream disappears underground and it's unclear where it joins the watershed again. It's assume there's not much to it.