An approximate 69% of adult razor clams at Ninilchik beaches and 84% at Clam Gulch beaches have died. The department said the cause of the high natural mortality rate of the clams remains unknown, but may be due to a combination of heavy surf, habitat changes, environmental stressor and predation.
The Lummi Nation has declared a disaster after removing 70,000 invasive European green crabs from their sea pond in November. According to Seattle-based King News, the Lummi Nation cultivates shellfish and juvenile salmon in their 750-acre sea pond. The European green crab preys on young oysters, clams, and are known to dig down into the sand, uprooting eel grass, which is habitat for juvenile salmon.
Scientists now say that the harmful alga will survive the winter and that it will probably turn green in the Oslo fjord next year as well.
Scotland’s only working nuclear power plant at Torness shut down in an emergency procedure this week when jellyfish clogged the sea water-cooling intake pipes at the plant. To protect marine life and avert nuclear disasters, scientists are investigating the use of drones to provide estimates of jellyfish locations, amounts, and density.
We saw over 100 on a 1/2 mile stretch of beach. I am wondering if the chiton die-off is related to the stormy conditions or something else?
King and snow crab populations in the Bering Sea have plummeted ahead of the harvest season, some by 99% compared to previous years.
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.
Swarms of giant jellyfish are floating along the coastline of the Sea of Japan, and the damage they may cause to fisheries is feared to be the worst in more than a decade.
It is apparent that this area of coastline has experienced a sharp decline in its prawn populations. This may be due to increased fishing pressure from commercial prawn fishermen.
A self-cloning and invincible enemy invades coastal areas. The carpet sea squirt (Didemnum vexillum) or “marine vomit” have been observed nearby Stavanger and Bergen. Large yellow flakes has spread on the seabed and kills everything beneath. It may grow on boats and can spread along the coast.
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.
"This year I walked along the same route after a rainstorm and see only one or two — sometimes none"
Extreme drought in the west means that households with private waterworks are out of water. Elvar's dried up. "The situation is very serious," he says.
About 10% of our catch during dip net fishing at mouth of Kenai River was harboring these worms.
"While on a field trip for work, we stopped at the beach and you can notice hundreds of dead clams and star fish littering the beach."
Several people have fallen ill with food poisoning after eating shellfish in B.C. in the last 10 days, and health officials are warning that warm ocean waters might be to blame.
"The first wave of dead mussels washed ashore on July 14th, possibly earlier but this was the first report we received. I took the pictures included in my LEO observation on July 16th, and the temperatures were only just then beginning to climb into the upper 70s and lower 80s."
A European Skipper butterfly is observed in Northwest BC, an introduced species and one of several stressors underlying insect declines.
In Malahat Drive in BC, an extraordinary heat wave, combined with low tides during the middle of the day resulted in the die off of possibly billions of intertidal invertebrates along the coast of British Columbia and Washington State.
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.
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