Do Not Mess With Fish 123

and you thought fish were fun! but these are not so funny, yesterday I mentioned birds falling dead from the sky, in a couple of cases dead birds struck people or objects, one dead bird striking a woman walking her dog and another hit a police vehicle, also that thousands of fish had died, the fish kill included menhayden, spots and croakers, now it appears that there have been at least 4 other kill zones in the States, but worry not, 'the blackbirds were flying at rooftop level instead of treetop level to avoid explosions above, said Karen Rowe, an ornithologist with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, 'Blackbirds have poor eyesight and they started colliding with things',

as for the fish, all fish have different tolerances to oxygen tension, the amount of oxygen dissolved in water, as the amount of oxygen reduces the fish that need most die first, followed by the second most needy etc, at some point fish adapted to live in a habitat where there was little or no oxygen in the water by developing a labyrinth organ, in easy terms similar to our lungs, some fish have both gills to breath underwater and can air breath, the fish breath air the same as us, keep some labyrinths underwater to long and they will drown!

but in an unrelated incident on the other side of the world hundreds of dead snapper have washed up on Coromandel beaches on the North Island of New Zealand, leaving people at Little Bay and Waikawau Bay, on the north-east of the peninsula, stunned when children came out of the sea with armfuls of the fish and within minutes the shore was littered with them, Charlotte Pearsall, whose family have lived at Little Bay for the last 30 years, said she had never seen anything like it, she said that people with binoculars said the snapper stretched as far as they could see and boaties reported "a carpet of floating fish further out to sea all along the coast"

"We initially thought 'woohoo a free feed' but they had really cloudy eyes and you could see the birds had been at them, some of them had no eyes," Pearsall said, cloudy eyes would tend to indicate the fish had been dead for some time, again for me best guess oxygen starvation, due to what? a localised increase in perhaps temperature, or algae bloom resulting again in a oxygen level drop, it will be interesting to find out what the cause actually was.