The dead sea stars, usually the most eye-catching creatures in tidal pools, hit him particularly hard. “The more I walked and the more I saw, the more sobering it all became,” Harley said. The scientist in him was excited, he admitted, to see the real-life effect of something he had been studying for so long. When he walked to the beach last week on one of the hottest days, the smell of decay struck him immediately. Just before the heat wave, when Harley took in the eye-popping weather forecasts, he thought about how low the tide would be at midday, baking the exposed mussels, sea stars and barnacles. A study by an international team of climate researchers found it would have been virtually impossible for such extremes to occur without global warming. Hundreds of people died last week when the heat wave parked over the Pacific Northwest. Such extreme weather conditions will become more frequent and intense, scientists say, as climate change, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, wreaks havoc on animals and humans alike.
Heat wave killed wildlife masse series#
Harley continues to study the damage and plans to publish a series of papers. Factoring in the other creatures that live in the mussel beds and on the shore - barnacles, hermit crabs and other crustaceans, various worms, tiny sea cucumbers - puts the deaths at easily over 1 billion, he said. He estimated losses for the mussels alone in the hundreds of millions.
To calculate the death toll, Harley first looked at how many blue mussels live on a particular shoreline, how much of the area is good habitat for mussels and what fraction of the mussels he observed died. “It just feels like one of those postapocalyptic movies,” said Christopher Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia who studies the effects of climate change on coastal marine ecosystems. 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.
Sockeye salmon swam sluggishly in an overheated Washington river, prompting wildlife officials to truck them to cooler areas. Like in 'Postapocalyptic Movies': Heat Wave Killed Marine Wildlife en Masseĭead mussels near Suicide Bend Park in West Vancouver, B.C., Canada.ĭead mussels and clams coated rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they had been boiled.
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