There are actually more than 100’000 cassin auklets bodies accumulating along the West coasts – from California up to BC. And nobody seems to know why!
It is a West Coast mystery! A creepy mysterious mass die-off, certainly indicating that there is something wrong.
Scientists are trying to determine why thousands of tiny seabirds called Cassin’s auklets have washed up on the West Coast, all the way from B.C. to California. They are baffled as necropsies show no disease, no viruses, no bacteria. So what the heck!
Hundreds of thousands of birds dead on the beach is something that we just can’t ignore — we ignore that at our peril.
So why are beaches from California to Haida Gwaii covered in dead birds? According to scientists and ornithologists this is unprecedent. A never seen before mass kill along the entire West Coast.
Common murres and Cassin’s auklets are found dead on the beach in great numbers. And these death rates are up to 100 times greater than normal annual death rates.
So what’s sure is that the population for some reason has snugged up to the coast. So there is something weird going on with the ecosystem. Is it climate change? The thing is that climate change introduces very slow, steady changes. The ongoing mass die-off has however started abruptly.
Ecosystem collapse?
Could it be that there’s less of their food, or perhaps that food has changed its distribution? Is there something in the environment which is signaling a difference, signaling a change? A too good breading season?
Radioactive birds?
What about radioactivity? We know that the Daiichi nuclear plant is still releasing radioactive substances into the ocean and that some of the Fukushima’s radiation has reached the US west coast and probably that of Canada – a bit further north! So what if the level of JAPAN’S radioactivity had so drastically changed the ecosystem in the open waters that sea birds – cassins auklet – had to move towards the coast and die.
Scientists I would really try to measure the radiactivity level in these dead bodies!
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