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What's Killing The Animals? The Mysteries Of Mass Deaths

dead sharks found on Prestatyn beach

Around 30 smooth-hound sharks found on 6 June

Sadly, Gem agreed we'll likely never know the definite cause of this week's stranding.

She said: "I wouldn’t want to make an assumption. It could have had a completely natural cause. It could have been a current that brought them in together.

A number of starry smooth-hound sharks were also found on a beach in Merseyside in May.
1686311804180.png
 
Water pollution from Liverpool, perhaps?
 
Mass deaths on the 'Island of the Seals,

More than 300 northern fur seals and Steller sea lions have been found dead in a mystery mass die-off on a small, uninhabited island in Siberia.

Tyuleniy Island, also known as the 'Island of the Seals,' is located in the Sea of Okhotsk and is an important breeding ground for northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus).

Photos taken by conservationists from the Friends of the Ocean wildlife relief group and the environmental education organization Club Boomerang show carcasses strewn across the coast. Most of the dead animals were seals. Dead birds were also found.

https://www.livescience.com/animals...inhabited-siberian-island-under-investigation
 
This is tragic & shocking

At least 1,000 birds died from colliding with one Chicago building in one day

At least 1,000 birds died from colliding into a single building in Chicago on Thursday, 5 October, as they migrated south to their wintering grounds. Volunteers are still recovering bird carcasses within 1.5 miles of McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America, which is largely covered with glass.

“It’s the tip of an iceberg but it’s it’s a huge, huge amount of birds we found both dead and injured,” said Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, adding that this was the highest number of bird strikes that the group recorded from the grounds of one building in a single day.

From late Wednesday, 4 October, through early Thursday, 5 October, a peak estimate of 1.5 million birds were in the air over Cook county, home to the Chicago metropolitan area. Carcasses of Tennessee warblers, hermit thrush, American woodcocks and other varieties of songbirds were recovered.

Not every bird that hits the window is going to leave behind a body,” said Brendon Samuels, who researches bird window collisions at the University of Western Ontario.

He noted that the true extent of affected birds will unravel over a couple of days as people continue to pick up birds around downtown Chicago.

“In fact, we often see birds collide with glass and they continue flying some distance away, seriously injured in ways that ultimately they won’t survive past a few hours,” Samuels added.

Of all cities in the US, Chicago’s light pollution poses the greatest risk for migrating birds. Turning off building lights is one way to reduce fatalities. A 2021 study done in McCormick Place, the same site of Thursday’s bird deaths, found that shutting off half the lights in large buildings can reduce collisions by six to 11 times. McCormick Place is a participant of the Lights Out Chicago program, which has buildings voluntarily switch off or dim lights at night unless someone is inside.

“It is important to understand that there is an event going on at Lakeside Center [part of McCormick Place] this week, so, therefore, the lights have been on when occupied. Once the space is unoccupied, the lights have been turned off,” said a representative from McCormick Place.

“It’s a known hazard, and yet we still can’t see action being taken about it,” says Prince.

Having window glass with visual markers like dots or patterns can break up the appearance of reflection and let birds recognize whether there is a safe passage for them to fly through.

In 2020, Chicago approved a bird-friendly design ordinance but it is yet to take effect. In 2021, the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, signed the Bird Safe Buildings Act, which “requires bird-friendly design to be incorporated into the construction and renovation of state-owned buildings” in the state, per Audobon.org.

“We have a lot of existing buildings that are killing birds, not just new construction,” said Samuels, adding that investments in retrofits, creating tax credits for such environmental initiatives and making windows more bird-friendly can be an economical way to solve this. “We already have solutions, we just need to put those into policy.”
1696682516783.png
 
This is tragic & shocking

At least 1,000 birds died from colliding with one Chicago building in one day

At least 1,000 birds died from colliding into a single building in Chicago on Thursday, 5 October, as they migrated south to their wintering grounds. Volunteers are still recovering bird carcasses within 1.5 miles of McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America, which is largely covered with glass.

“It’s the tip of an iceberg but it’s it’s a huge, huge amount of birds we found both dead and injured,” said Annette Prince, director of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, adding that this was the highest number of bird strikes that the group recorded from the grounds of one building in a single day.


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It's shocking if you've never heard it but it happens every year. They have a voluntary plan to darken buildings so birds don't think windows are sky. But it's not enforced. Unfortunately, as these somewhat preventable mass mortality events continue, it may be a wake up call for businesses to get on board with the plan to reduce deaths.
 
It's shocking if you've never heard it but it happens every year. They have a voluntary plan to darken buildings so birds don't think windows are sky. But it's not enforced. Unfortunately, as these somewhat preventable mass mortality events continue, it may be a wake up call for businesses to get on board with the plan to reduce deaths.
I think this should be a very loud alarm bell and be introduced as a statutory legal regulation.
 
The trend to keep making buildings out of glass is to blame as well. Even if they are not lit, they reflect the sky and so look like sky. This happens on a smaller scale all the time as well. Amazes me we have any birds left at all. :(
 
The trend to keep making buildings out of glass is to blame as well. Even if they are not lit, they reflect the sky and so look like sky. This happens on a smaller scale all the time as well. Amazes me we have any birds left at all. :(
Personally, I've never seen or heard of Swallows, Swifts and Martins crashing into reflective surfaces such as windows?
But a few weeks ago I happened to be researching a bit on Swallows, Swifts and Martins, and found (never heard of this before) that some of their specie do not rely only on sight, they have the ability to use another skill in sync, similar to how bat's fly in total darkness, and that is a form of 'echo location!' Makes me wonder if all three have this ability?
Amazing things birds ~ hmm?
*'Bird-Brained' might have to take on a whole new meaning now!

1696757122187.png
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378595506003327
 
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Were they doing the Can Can?

Thousands of tons of dead sardines have washed up on a beach in northern Japan for unknown reasons, officials said on Friday.

The sardines and some mackerel washed ashore in Hakodate on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido on Thursday morning, creating a sliver blanket along a stretch of beach about a kilometre (0.6 miles) long.

Local residents said they have never seen anything like it. Some gathered the fish to sell or eat.

The town, in a notice posted on its website, urged residents not to consume the fish.

Japan Dead Sardines

Officials warned residents not to consume the fish as they did not yet know why they had washed up (Kyodo News via AP)

Takashi Fujioka, a Hakodate Fisheries Research Institute researcher, said he had heard of similar phenomena before, but it was his first time seeing it.

He said the fish may have been chased by larger fish, become exhausted due to a lack of oxygen while moving in a densely packed school, and were washed up by the waves.

https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/t...es-wash-ashore-in-northern-japan-1562174.html
 
That'll play right into the hands of China and their boycott of Japanese fish imports.
 
Were they doing the Can Can?

Thousands of tons of dead sardines have washed up on a beach in northern Japan for unknown reasons, officials said on Friday.

The sardines and some mackerel washed ashore in Hakodate on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido on Thursday morning, creating a sliver blanket along a stretch of beach about a kilometre (0.6 miles) long.

Local residents said they have never seen anything like it. Some gathered the fish to sell or eat.

The town, in a notice posted on its website, urged residents not to consume the fish.

Japan Dead Sardines

Officials warned residents not to consume the fish as they did not yet know why they had washed up (Kyodo News via AP)

Takashi Fujioka, a Hakodate Fisheries Research Institute researcher, said he had heard of similar phenomena before, but it was his first time seeing it.

He said the fish may have been chased by larger fish, become exhausted due to a lack of oxygen while moving in a densely packed school, and were washed up by the waves.

https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/t...es-wash-ashore-in-northern-japan-1562174.html
Or this. . .
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...ma-radioactive-water-into-the-sea/ar-AA1lcUKG
 
Classic doomscrollers' post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. Why should radiation in the sea at Fukushima cause fish to become stranded on one beach, over 330 miles away as the crow flies?

maximus otter
Could it possibly be down to sea currants from Fukushima, or maybe a change in the direction?
 
Earlier this year I went beach combing after a ferocious storm from the SW. I didn't find anything much. What was interesting was the beach near to the sea was covered in dead small fishes all the same species. A bloke walking his dog said they were White Bait and hazarded a guess that sea currants during the storm had washed them beach wards and the monstrous waves had washed them up on the beach. Being small, they couldn't swim against the force of the waves whereas larger fish could. There was also plenty of star fish, bit's of larger fish bodies and cuttlefish skeletons.

I've seen the same before after a storm has been through.
 
Could it possibly be down to sea currants from Fukushima, or maybe a change in the direction?
Blimey - thought there was something a bit fishy when I typed out that word. *Correction. . . currents!
Was baking a bread pudding before hand - that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it (not literally you understand) regardless. :twothumbs:
 
Blimey - thought there was something a bit fishy when I typed out that word. *Correction. . . currents!
Was baking a bread pudding before hand - that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it (not literally you understand) regardless.:twothumbs:
I also spelt currents wrong as well in my post above. That's a strange coincidence.
 

The fish that eats piranhas for breakfast​



Fisherman carries a full size Arapaipma Gigas



Guillermo Otta Parum has been fishing in the Bolivian Amazon his whole life, for more than 50 years.

At first, Guillermo was catching native fish, such as the various kinds of catfish which inhabit the river.
But then a giant freshwater fish arrived, known locally as paiche or Arapaipma Gigas, to give it its scientific name.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-66786995
 
Whilst not on the Mass Death scale, dog owners in the U.K. are being warned about another fatal illness that can affect their canine companions, Alabama Rot.
It affects their paws and causes skin lesions which leads to kidney failure and death. The newspapers are reporting there is no known cure, instead they advise that you clean your dogs paws on return from a wet sloshy play in the mud and dry them off well.
We can’t keep our springers out of the rivers and muddy puddles. It is the highlight of their day, but we will have to exercise more caution in light of this current threat. Hopefully some dog loving boffin will come up with a preventative inoculation in the not too distant future.

https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/diseases/alabamarot
 

Hundreds of thousands of salmon released in Northern California river die in 'large mortality' event


As many as hundreds of thousands of fall-run Chinook salmon died early last week due to suspected gas bubble disease. The fish were released into the 257-mile-long Klamath River near the California-Oregon border following November’s historic dam removal at the site, which was intended to help the stream flow freely again and bolster the habitat for the protected species.

Gas bubble disease is noninfectious, and it’s caused by environmental or physical trauma resulting from a change in pressure in spring or groundwater.

Officials with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife believe up to 830,000 salmon fry — the young that have just consumed their egg sac and emerged from the gravel where they are born — succumbed to the disease as they migrated through the 16-foot-wide Iron Gate Dam tunnel, where they may have encountered a “severe pressure change.”

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/chinook-salmon-klamath-river-northern-california-18701662.php

maximus otter
 

The fish that eats piranhas for breakfast​



Fisherman carries a full size Arapaipma Gigas



Guillermo Otta Parum has been fishing in the Bolivian Amazon his whole life, for more than 50 years.

At first, Guillermo was catching native fish, such as the various kinds of catfish which inhabit the river.
But then a giant freshwater fish arrived, known locally as paiche or Arapaipma Gigas, to give it its scientific name.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-66786995
Caught a small one of those when fishing in Thailand years ago,there’s also a huge one in Kew Gardens.
 
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