This is more than just a shellfish die-off. This is the loss of income to the family businesses that work the fisheries. First, these fishery's families had to navigate acidic ocean waters and now the shellfish they are dependent on to make a living are dying of heat exposure. Water doesn't have to be boiling to kill fish. The boiling water used in the preparation of the fish is used to kill the bacteria that might be attached to the fish or living on the shell.
The oceans are not doing well due to the heat. A few months ago an entire population of Bowhead Whales (click here) lost their ability to migrate because the usual change in water temperature didn't tip them off.
This alarming reality seems to be happening on the margins of life, but, Bowhead Whales are hardly marginal species. They are mammals just like human beings. There is plenty to be worried about and the fisheries are just the beginning.
By Catrin Einhorn
Dead mussels near Suicide Bend Park in West Vancouver, British Columbia
Dead mussels and clams (click here) coated rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they’d 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.
“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.
To calculate the death toll, Dr. 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. He estimated losses for the mussels alone in the hundreds of millions. 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 a billion, he said....
