The recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest has been causing various issues, such as an increase in wild fires, its also caused millions upon millions of sea creatures to die.
"Christopher Harley, a professor in the zoology department at The University of British Columbia, found countless dead mussels popped open and rotting in their shells on Sunday at Kitsilano Beach, which is a few blocks away from his Vancouver home.
Harley studies the effects of climate change on the ecology of rocky shores where clams, mussels and sea stars live, so he wanted to see how the intertidal invertebrates were faring in the record heat wave that hit the area on June 26-28."
Harley could smell the beach before he got to Kitsilano Beach to find "a catastrophe".
"Mussels attach themselves to rocks and other surfaces and are used to being exposed to the air and sunlight during low tide, Harley said, but they generally can't survive temperatures over 100 degrees for very long."
"Temperatures in downtown Vancouver were 98.6 degrees on June 26, 99.5 on the 27th and 101.5 on the 28th."
"*Harley said the heat may have killed as many as a billion mussels and other sea creatures in the Salish Sea, which includes the Strait of Georgia, the Puget Sound, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but he said that was a very preliminary estimate.
He said that 50 to 100 mussels could live in a spot the size of the palm of your hand and that several thousand could fit in an area the size of a kitchen stovetop."There's 4,000-some miles of shoreline in the Salish Sea, so when you start to scale up from what we're seeing locally to what we're expecting, based on what we know where mussels live, you get to some very big numbers very quickly," he said. "Then you start adding in all the other species, some of which are even more abundant.""*
I normally wouldnt quote so much directly but I thought it worked best this time.
Read the article from David Williams of CNN :
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/10/weather/heat-sea-life-deaths-trnd-scn/index.html
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