Mass Animal Die Offs

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hobkyl
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I had heard of the New Years Eve mass death of blackbirds in Arkansas. I had also heard about one or two of the mass deaths of fish in recent months.

Again..another mass loss of fish life in the LA Harbor...where millions of sardines were washed in.

Ok...mother earth is large and its animals plentiful...however curiously got the best of me and I did some searching and learned this actually happening quite frequently all across the world as of late.

Thoughts, theories?

Is this something that occurs regularly as some claim? Or is it a sign of things to come as others claim?
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I remember hearing about the birds in Arkansas. I wonder if a flock flew directly over the smokestack of a power plant or something like that.
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us. ~Henry David Thoreau
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hobkyl
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They attributed it to either a thunderstorm or fireworks, although the state is/was still conducting an investigation. 5 days later an estimated 100,000 drum fish were found dead in the Arkansas River near the Ozark Dam.

However these are only two instances that made national news (that I heard of at least). Meanwhile...across the world many more fish and birds are dying in mass quantities...

http://de-de.facebook.com/topic.php?uid ... &topic=305

There are numerous other sites out there with links to local news sources as well.
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Matt
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It happens. Probably more recently due to human cause more than ever, but it has always happened. Many factors are at cause. In the Ocean, fishing techniques are causing more mass die offs than anything conceivable on land (ever kill several million animals at once?)

Refinery discharge causes huge fish kills. And this happens every day. Fish swim and eat within the extremely toxic waters within a discharge zone. Then birds eat the fish as the fish are dying.
No wonder why most coastal die offs involve both fish and birds.

Most die off seem to be natural (disease, accidental poisoning, navigation error, starvation).

The most dramatic mass die off in modern history that was directly natural (maybe indirectly caused by global warming) is the "Coral Bleaching" die-off of barrier reefs that started in the 80s and continues as far as up to 2006. We lost 90% of the great barrier reefs and the biodiversity loss and ecological impact can probably never be measured.

The realization that they seem to be happening frequently and around the world are mostly likely due to several factors, one being the fact people report these die offs instantly using the internet.

Here's an effort to map those die offs we are aware of (I'm sure there are much more that we are not)
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8& ... 5af104a22b
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hobkyl
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Matt's link is more accurate. The one I posted, I found several discrepancies in.

While I believe that natural cycle of life, diseases, natural disasters and human's affect on the planet all play a part in these deaths...its hard to ignore the amount of deaths worldwide in a short time span.

Instant internet access? If you look at these deaths...we are talking about between December and today. Not last year, or within the last 10 years combined for that matter. The internet and cell phones with cameras have been around for 10+ years. These deaths are occuring in civilized countries...so they/we've had the technology. Yet we never saw it make headlines. (Granted, if you search you will find some cases prior to recent events)

However, we are talking about an unprecedented amount of reports all within a three month period.
“There’s an inconsequentiality to our lives that living in the wilderness shows up. Mountain are real, they set their limits, they set ours. They expose us, make us vulnerable and strong at the same time. “
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Matt
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What history do you have to compare to?
There were never any mass-scale, global efforts to document mass die offs, especially one that reports them all in one spot (as if they are related). So if there is an acceleration, from what?

People didn't have the ability to text and map all of this a decade ago. And there were no social networks allowing non-scientists to contribute (and when non-scientists contribute -- see the project noah post) a ton more data than ever collected before and be congregated easily.

We are talking about a number of killing over a three month period. unprecedented? ok... show me preceding measurements taken and reported the same way. Also, who is to say that a three month peak of killings doesn't happen yearly? or ever el nino year? There are no measurements in the past on this scale before internet, before people even thought about looking at die-offs geographically, before they looked at more than one species together, before scientists in different countries could collaborate. Of course there are more now... because people are looking more.

We can't say without taking measurements consistently over at least a decade. And right now we are on the cusp of a social data gathering revolution... something we did not have before. See the Noah project post.

It would be like saying that there is an epidemic of people taking photos of their children. The stats show that facebook and flickr photo uploads of children are on the rise. But if you are just showing the rise of three months, and ignoring partial data, ignoring that before the internet, people may have taken more children pics than now, but who was counting?

Yeah, there may be an increase in die offs... but we wont know. Because we don't know what is normal for die offs.

Someone can't stand on a street corner and tell me a car that just speeds passed is going faster than it did yesterday when they did not stand on that corner yesterday.
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hobkyl
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Perhaps I am naive...

But riddle me this...

This may be the first time in history that all these occurences have been compiled, yes...but I believe we can go back and do specific searches for prior years. With the internet, we have years and years of records. Just as I can search for murders in Rochester, NY 2010...I can also search for 2002 and get answers. It might not be compiled in a spread sheet for me, but I could read article after article from various local news sources and have a basic understanding of how many murders occured. I could also search for building projects, laws enacted, birth announcements or any other subject that makes the news on a regular basis in any locale for prior years.

While I dont have the time nor do I care to compile all previous record of mass animal deaths, a few quick specific searches (year, species, country, state) doesnt yield many results.

100s or 1000s of birds or fish dying near civilization would make the news no matter what year it is. 5000 birds dont just drop out of the sky and go unnoticed (unless it was in an area uninhabited by humans-in which case there are more instances of it occuring than documented-which Im sure there is) Social networking, access to a cell phone or a laptop wouldnt play into it. It might make it easier to report and spread the information but 20 or even 50 years ago if 5000 birds dropped out of the sky in Henrietta or Portland, OR for that matter, people would have known about it and reported it as news. You dont need to be a scientist to report such oddities. It would be newsworthy and thus it would be recorded and archived. There would also be state's DEC records and reports that would document such instances.

If it made the news I would think that a search would locate that record of it. (I may be wrong and if so welcome the correction.)
“There’s an inconsequentiality to our lives that living in the wilderness shows up. Mountain are real, they set their limits, they set ours. They expose us, make us vulnerable and strong at the same time. “
--Alison Wat




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hobkyl
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Hundreds of dead fish in a pond in suburban Chicago.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Hu ... 29673.html

More than usual seal strandings on NJ beaches.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Do ... 93408.html
“There’s an inconsequentiality to our lives that living in the wilderness shows up. Mountain are real, they set their limits, they set ours. They expose us, make us vulnerable and strong at the same time. “
--Alison Wat




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