Crushing heat wave in Pacific Northwest and Canada cooked shellfish alive by the millions

[UngulateNerd92]

Amid the crushing summer heat wave that has slammed the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada, Alyssa Gehman, a marine ecologist who lives by the sea in Vancouver, B.C., walked down to the shore to go for a swim. As expected, the beach was packed with others looking to beat the heat.

She made her way to the edge of the water. It smelled like putrid shellfish – cooking.

All around her, beds of mussels had popped open, dead. The heat beating down on the rocks had killed them, and she could see dead tissue between their shells.

A dead crab floated in the water, she said.

Gehman studies marine community ecology, but this was the first time she had seen anything of this “magnitude of mortality.” An estimated 1 billion small sea creatures – including mussels, clams and snails – died during the heat wave in the Salish Sea, off more than 4,000 miles of linear shore, according to marine biologist Chris Harley.

Record-breaking temperatures hit the Pacific Northwest at the end of June, with an all-time high in British Columbia of 121 degrees. British Columbia reported at least 719 people suffered “sudden and unexpected deaths,” three times more than what would normally occur in the province during a seven-day period.

Lisa Lapointe, the province’s chief coroner, said in a statement last week that the extreme heat probably was “a significant contributing factor” in the increased number of deaths.

Crushing heat wave in Pacific Northwest and Canada cooked shellfish alive by the millions

 

[UngulateNerd92]

Here is another relevant article.

Like in 'Postapocalyptic Movies': Heat Wave Killed Marine Wildlife en Masse

Dead mussels and clams coated rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they had been boiled. Sea stars were baked to death. Sockeye salmon swam sluggishly in an overheated Washington river, prompting wildlife officials to truck them to cooler areas.

The combination of extraordinary heat and drought that hit the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten untold species in freshwater, according to a preliminary estimate and interviews with scientists.

Like in 'Postapocalyptic Movies': Heat Wave Killed Marine Wildlife en Masse

A friend of mine shared this article on Facebook and here is what he had to say about it. He brings up great points;

"Don't Give Up!

This awful event on top of all the devastation humanity has caused wildlife and nature. Does society really care?

I'm looking at "top stories" in the news right now and they're about rent prices, more on a Florida building collapse, statues coming down, and a tennis match. Oh, and another about the current nasty heat wave in the U.S.

Then there's this article about massive marine life dying, obscured by hundreds of unrelated other news items. Too many of us, and big media in particular, see accelerating destruction of life on Earth as something that's now routine. That makes it easy to look away. The root causes are too complicated to deal with.

This is not acceptable to me. I am, for the most part, no longer speaking out on issues unrelated to humanity's destruction of nature. I no longer have time for them. What's happening to life on my Earth is my "headline" everyday. Other issues pale in comparison or are of no interest.

Can things change for the better? Don't know. But I won't give up or lose faith, nope, I won't give up."