Acres of Dead Mussels Across Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver, Canada
Greetings to you! In this blog, I have more sobering news on unfortunate events due to climate change. In late June, climate change heat killed about a billion shellfish on western Canada’s beaches.
Christopher Harley, zoology department professor at The University of British Columbia discovered “countless dead mussels popped open and rotting in their shells at Kitsalano Beach.” This beach is a few blocks away from Harley’s Vancouver home. The professor researches the effects of climate change on rocky shores where “clams, mussels and sea stars live.” Harley wanted to observe how “the intertidal invertebrates were faring in the record heat wave that hit the area on June 26-28.”
Professor Harley estimated that a “billion mussels, clams and other animals may have died from the heat.” Harley said, “I could smell that beach before I got to it, because there was already a lot of dead animals from the previous day, which was not the hottest of three. I started having a look around just on my local beach and thought, ‘Oh, this, this can’t be good.'”
The following day, Harley took one of his students over to Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver. He’d been visiting this beach for more than 12 years. He said, “It was a catastrophe over there. There’s a really extensive mussel bed that coats the shore and most of those animals had died.”
Extraordinary Record-Breaking Heat
Harley said, “Mussels attach themselves to rocks and other surfaces and are used to being exposed to the air and sunlight during low tide, but they generally can’t survive temperatures over 100 degrees for very long. Temperatures in downtown Vancouver were 98.6 degrees on June 26th and June 27th and on the 28th were 101.5. It was even hotter on the beach.”
Harley and his student brought to the beach, an “FLIR thermal imaging camera that found surface temperatures topping 125 degrees. At this time of the year, low tide hits at the hottest part of the day in the area, so the animals can’t make it until the tide comes back in.” he said.
Climate scientists called the heat wave in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest in the United States, “unprecedented” and they “warned that climate change would make these events more frequent and intense.”
Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told CNN “We saw heat records over the weekend only to be broken again the next day, particularly for a part of the country where this type of heat does not happen very often.”
Over two dozen scientists at the World Weather Attribution explained that the heat wave, “would have been virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused climate change.”
On June 30th, in Lytton, British Columbia, it’s temperature “topped 121 degrees” Fahrenheit, which broke Canada’s all-time record! Unfortunately, this town was destroyed in a extraordinary wildfire. As a result, “There were 719 deaths reported to the province’s coroners between June 25 and July 1 — three times as many as would normally occur during that time period,” said Lisa Lapointe, British Columbia’s chief coroner.
Help children learn more about climate change and manatees by reading the award-winning Kobee Manatee® Educational Picture Book series! There’s a new fourth installment of the series coming out in September 2021. It’s titled, Kobee Manatee® Climate Change and The Great Blue Hole Hazard. This [Book 4] of the series teaches children all about climate change and plastic pollution with Dr. Tracy Fanara.
Kobee Manatee® Climate Change and The Great Blue Hole Hazard, will be released in September 2021!
Keep watching for more of my updates on the Florida manatee and climate change!
If you see any sick or injured manatees, please call the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at: 1-888-404-3922 (FWCC). They are the folks who are responsible for rescuing us in Florida.
Here’s the Save the Manatee Club link to learn more about us manatees …
Here’s a cool link for you to learn more about how we’re rescued and brought into rehabilitation …
~ Kobee Manatee