10,000 jumbo squid washed up dead in Chile (no, it's not Fukushima)

[Judi Lynn]

10,000 jumbo squid washed up dead in Chile (no, it's not Fukushima)

By Sarah Keartes February 11 2016

Known for its rocky cliffs and untouched beaches, Chile's Isla de Santa Maria is is a sparsely populated spot. But last month, the island's coastline was suddenly littered with the crimson carcasses of over 10,000 dead Humboldt squid.

Scientists in the area are still working to trace the cause of this mass stranding, but one thing we do know is this is not the result of Fukushima radiation.

The large cephalopods (Dosidicus gigas), sometimes called “jumbo squid” or “red devils”, have been documented stranding like this since 2002, nearly a decade before the Fukushima disaster occurred. As in the case of starfish wasting syndrome and many other wildlife anomalies that sent the internet into radiation-related panic spirals, we can cast the Fukushima hypothesis aside.

Instead, a likely explanation is that the squid encountered an offshore warm-water blob that commonly forms in the area during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months – and recent El Niño weather patterns mean it will be sticking around longer than usual.

More:
http://www.earthtouchnews.com/oceans/deep-ocean/10000-jumbo-squid-washed-up-dead-in-chile-no-its-not-fukushima

[saturnsring]

1. not a warning sign at all- nothing to see here excpt the 6th mass extinction

[sue4e3]

2. what gets me if 10,000 humans dropped dead we would be freaking out and there is 7 billion of us

any other animal on this planet and we're like, well its happened before maybe not to this magnitude and there is more of them. I'm sitting here like WTF.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. If human mothers had 3,000 babies at one time, this would probably happen regularly.

Extreme population explosions and die-offs are part of the package for r-strategy populations.

Plus, animals that travel in shoals of 1000 or more are much more subject to mass die-offs simply from wandering into a bad environment. Animals that live mostly solo aren't likely to suffer the same fate unless something like an epidemic, drought, or freeze strikes.

[sue4e3]

4. I mean I get it, but some time I wonder if the people reading this

can actually visualize ten thousand of these animals dieing in one place. I can and it's heart breaking