“An estimated 1 billion small sea creatures – including mussels, clams and snails – died during the heat wave in the Salish Sea
[…].”
More than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast are likely to have died from last week’s record heatwave, experts warn […].
The “heat dome” that settled over western Canada
and the north-western US for five days pushed temperatures in
communities along the coast to 40C (104F) – shattering longstanding
records and offering little respite for days. The intense and unrelenting heat is believed to have killed as many as 500 people in the province of British Columbia and contributed to the hundreds of wildfires currently burning across the province.
But experts fear it also had a devastating impact on marine life.Christopher Harley, a marine biologist at the
University of British Columbia, has calculated that more than a billion
marine animals may have been killed by the unusual heat.A walk along a Vancouver-area beach highlighted the magnitude of devastation brought on by the heatwave, he said. “The
shore doesn’t usually crunch when you walk on it. But there were so
many empty mussel shells lying everywhere that you just couldn’t avoid
stepping on dead animals while walking around,” he said. Harley
was struck by the smell of rotting mussels, many of which were in
effect cooked by the abnormally warm water. Snails, sea stars and clams
were decaying in the shallow water. “It was an overpowering, visceral
experience,” he said.While the air around
Vancouver hovered around the high 30s (about 100F), Harley and a student
used infrared cameras to record temperatures above 50C (122F) along the
rocky shore. […]The mass death of shellfish would temporarily
affect water quality because mussels and clams help filter the sea,
Harley said, keeping it clear enough that sunlight reaches the eelgrass
beds while also creating habitats for other species. “A
square meter of mussel bed could be home to several dozen or even one
hundred species,” he said. The tightly bunched way mussels live also
informed Harley’s calculation of the scope of the loss. […]While mussels can regenerate over a period of two years, a number of
starfish and clams live for decades, and they reproduce more slowly, so
their recovery is probably going to take longer.——-
Headline, image, caption, and text published by: Leyland Cecco. “’Heat dome’ probably killed 1bn marine animals on Canada coast, experts say.” The Guardian. 8 July 2021.
Omfg. This is also terrifying.