The commercial Silver harvest in the Norton Sound yielded the lowest numbers since 2002.This trend follows suit from last year as well, which yielded far less than projected. The run was “very poor,” Menard said. The preliminary catch was 7,100 Silvers. That’s less than half caught in the commercial fishery last year.
St. Lawrence Island, home to two native villages in the region, is also the summer home of several migratory seabird species, including kittiwakes, auklets, murre and shearwaters. Over the last several years, though, the bird colonies on the island have been shrinking, and no one has been able to determine why.
Orthione griffenis, or O. griffenis, eventually kills its host shrimp, and soon the remaining shrimp can’t find each other to reproduce, rendering a blue mud shrimp population extinct.
When Kathleen Reed descended for her usual weekly dive off the coast of Nanaimo, B.C., last Saturday she was shocked by how many dead sea cucumbers she saw. Experts and harvesters fear that sea cucumbers are being hit by an illness similar to sea star wasting disease.
The dolphins were part of a group of more than 50 that got into difficulty in the Cromarty Firth.
A state of emergency was declared in mid-August in Khatanga, a small town on the banks of the river of the same name in Russia’s far northern Taymyr Peninsula, after more than 1,200 dead reindeer were found scattered on the river’s banks.
A decades-long decline in salmon in the Yukon River has reached a crisis this year, forcing harvest closures and prompting emergency shipments of salmon from other regions of Alaska to river residents who are otherwise facing food shortages.
Starting last week, regional residents reported numerous dead seabirds washing up on regional beaches. Alaska Sea Grant Agent Gay Sheffield said there were carcasses of murres, puffins, shearwaters and a kittiwake starting on July 28; in Golovin, Solomon, Nome and a dead Little Diomede.
Poaching and climate change might be the reasons why more than 1,200 migrating animals did not make it across the wide Arctic waterway.
Chum returns are the lowest on record, leaving communities with empty freezers and uncertainty about getting through the winter.
As temperatures near and surpass triple digits, many reservoirs in California's Central Valley have diverted more water to cities and farmers during the drought, making rivers shallower and too hot for the fish to develop from eggs, a process which can take at least 60 days to complete. To combat the poor river conditions in the Central Valley, some fish preservation organizations have tried to save the salmon population by launching large scale trucking operations to transport millions of salmon to the San Pablo Bay, San Francisco Bay and other fish farms where they are more likely to survive.
The hordes of fish were killed by a red tide, a large "bloom" of toxic algae that appears on Florida's Gulf Coast about once a year. Experts say the bloom shouldn't be happening right now.
The prospects are dim for this summer’s Norton Sound commercial fishing and crabbing seasons.
A record-shattering heat wave June 26-28 coincided with some of the year's lowest tides on Puget Sound. The combination was lethal for millions of mussels, clams, oysters, sand dollars, barnacles, sea stars, moon snails, and other tideland creatures exposed to three afternoons of intense heat.
The Kuskokwim River king salmon run does not look particularly strong this year, but chum numbers look even worse. Historically, around 60% of the salmon in the river at this point in the season would be chum or sockeye, but right now Bethel Test Fishery numbers show that just over 20% of the salmon are.
The black substance was staining the feet of people at the beach, prompting one local resident to alert state officials.
“The midpoint of the Anchor River king salmon run was extremely late. These fish are really having some odd, unprecedented run timing and behavior."
The whale had earlier been spotted stranded.
The community of Gambell fought a distemper outbreak among its dog population this spring and managed to squash the epidemic in its early onset. Distemper is a deadly disease that can afflict dogs and wildlife alike and also has been documented in the North Atlantic to jump from dogs to marine mammals like seals.
The beluga had a ruptured intestine probably related to parasites, which were found in the whale’s abdomen, lungs and kidneys, Burek said. The parasites likely led to an entanglement within a section of the intestines, leading it to rupture. “Very unusual,” Burek said. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
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