More than 1 billion sea creatures were cooked to death on the western coast of Canada during the record-breaking heat wave last month. The heat wave, which topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, struck in late June killing animals such as mussels and rockweed in places that are about 1,000 km apart, E&E News reported, as per a post on Scientific American.
Experts were surprised by the “maritime massacre”. On one site, Galiano Island, off the mainland of British Columbia, 1 million mussels died in the an area the size of a tennis court, the report said. Another area, about 1 km in size, could to be a graveyard to 100 million barnacles. Christopher Harley, a professor at the University of British Columbia, is warning of a possible collapse of the region’s maritime ecosystem.
“So far, my students and I have recorded dead animals on beaches that span hundreds of kilometers of shoreline. Eventually, parts of the British Columbia coast may become more like Hong Kong and other hot parts of the world where many of the intertidal species die off every single summer,” he was quoted as saying.