But as global temperatures continue to rise, he expects more areas to feel the heat, too. This heat wave seemed to have hit the Salish Sea particularly hard, he said. Harley said he’s received observations of die-offs from other researchers, shellfish growers and beachgoers as far south as Hood Canal in Washington and as far north as Klemtu in British Columbia. “For most of the strange and wonderful creatures that call the mussel bed home, we don’t even know enough about them to know how many were lost and if and when they will recover.” “I also worry about the little things that most people-including biologists-don’t pay much attention to,” Harley added. Losing just those two species would cause biodiversity to decline, he said. Rockweed also provides important habitat for other species. Losing a good number of mussels, he said, could destabilize local parts of the ocean, since they filter the water and provide food for other species such as starfish, crabs and birds. “The system is already responding.”Īs they log more dead species across a greater number of habitats, Harley warned of the potential collapse of the region’s maritime ecosystem. “The more shorelines I visit, the higher my estimate becomes,” he said. A species of snail called dogwhelk already has started washing up. Harley said they’ve found more dead sea species in the weeks after the rare heat wave. Not all sites are as bad as the two I described, but you can fit a lot of tennis courts into a thousand kilometers,” he said. “The Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound have thousands of kilometers of coastline.

The team estimated that on one site-Galiano Island, a strip of land between Vancouver Island and the lower mainland of British Columbia-1 million mussels died in an area the size of a tennis court.Ī 1-kilometer area near White Rock is estimated to be a graveyard to 100 million barnacles, Harley said. This week, they’re saying it could be more than that. Last week, they estimated 1 billion dead sea animals. Those species are typically the first to wash ashore as they die. “I didn’t realize that I would spend most of the next few weeks madly dashing around the province to document such unprecedented impacts.”Īfter a four-day period in June when temperatures in the Pacific Northwest shattered records and broke 100 degrees Fahrenheit, Harley and his team visited shorelines to count the damage to sea creatures such as mussels and rockweed. I was not thinking to myself, ‘All of these things will probably be dead by Monday afternoon,’” Harley said. “I was on a shore just as the tide was falling on the first of the three hot days. Christopher Harley, a professor at the University of British Columbia, said the death toll kept climbing as his team investigated area beaches. The maritime massacre surprised even the experts. More than 1 billion sea creatures along the Vancouver coast were cooked to death during a record-breaking heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, according to preliminary data.

Wave wildlife masse