It’s death on a wide scale, biblical-type stuff: Millions of spot fish died last week in the Chesapeake Bay; red-winged blackbirds tumbled from the skies by the thousands in Arkansas and Kentucky over the holidays; and tens of thousands of pogies, drum fish, crab and shrimp went belly up last fall in a Louisiana bayou.
For an explanation of these mysterious events, some have turned to Scripture and the Mayan calendar, which suggests the world will end in 2012.
Wildlife experts say these massive kills were not the result of a man-made disaster or a spooky sign of the apocalypse. They happen all the time.
In Arkansas, state and federal biologists think sleeping birds probably heard a loud boom in the night and freaked out. In Louisiana, low-oxygen ocean water regularly creeps into the higher-oxygen bayou and suffocates fish and crustaceans.
Maryland wildlife biologists are still investigating the deaths of 2 million spot and some croakers, also known as drum fish. But they have a theory: These fish are particularly vulnerable to cold and were killed when water temperatures dropped suddenly and sharply in late December. Most of the dead ones were juveniles.
“It’s colder than it’s been in 25 years,” said Dawn Stoltzfus, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of the Environment. That’s terrible news for the spot. In 1976, 15 million were killed during a cold snap.
The department’s phones started ringing with reports of dead fish two days before the new year and haven’t stopped.
The state doesn’t bother to clean up. Nature takes its course when the fish wash up on shore, which started to happen Thursday, or birds pluck them from the water.
In Arkansas, “5,000 birds falling dead in people’s yards is just weird,” said Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “But the question is: Has this happened before?”
The answer is yes, “but probably in a cornfield. And foxes ate them all,” McGowan said.
