Tens of thousands of dead fish — menhaden, sharks, trout, bass, catfish and stingrays — litter the shoreline. Schoppe, 54, has lived near the Gulf Coast all his life, but he’s never seen so many dead fish. He recorded videos of the ocean as he drove along the beach, spotting washed-up fish along a nearly seven-mile stretch near Freeport, Tex.
“That’s all I could do at that point because I was kind of shocked,” Schoppe told The Washington Post. “Of course I’m not going to wait there to try to catch any trout; almost everyone is dead.”
Schoppe is one of those first witness at the scene. Texas officials later Visitors are advised to avoid the water while the cleaning crew cleans the fish.
While low oxygen levels cause fish kills every summer, the combination of warm water, calm seas and cloudy conditions left oxygen levels so low on Friday that led to in more dead fish than many officials had seen.
“By the time you’ve got a stretch of it and cleaned up and pushed back, you look back and a whole new wave of them comes ashore,” said Bryan Frazier, director of the Brazoria County Parks Department. “So you have to do it again.”
Frazier said cold water can hold more oxygen than warm water, and temperatures reached as high as 92 degrees in Brazoria County on Friday, according to the National Weather Service. For menhaden — the silvery, nearly foot-long fish most affected Friday — living in temperatures above 70 degrees can be difficult, officials said. Frazier said it will be difficult to determine how warm the water was because it’s unclear exactly where the fish died before surfacing.
Oxygen also gets into the water by mixing with wind and waves, Frazier said, but Gulf Coast waves have been calm for about three weeks. Also, photosynthesis creates oxygen, but the lack of sunlight in recent days has stopped the energy production process, Frazier said.
Officials called conditions “the perfect storm to deplete coastal oxygen levels.”
However, fish-kill The events happen almost every summer in Texas, officials said. The northern Gulf of Mexico constitutes one of the largest fish “dead zones” in the world, according to National Ocean Service.
Katie St. Clair, a sea life facility manager at Texas A&M University in Galveston, said menhaden are important to the ocean’s ecosystem. because they filter the water and serve as food for other fish. But St. said Clair that fish in the Gulf are used to adjusting and repopulating.
“This place is used for dynamic events,” he said.
While it’s not certain whether climate change had an influence on last week’s case, scientists say changes in temperature could lower oxygen levels in the water and cause the creatures to leave the water. sea in their habitats around the world. Similar instances have occurred in other states, such as Florida and Ohioand other parts of the world, including Australia and Europe.
Crews began using beach cleaning Friday to bury the dead fish under the sand dunes. Employees watched the dead fish continue to move toward the beach, where thousands more surfaced Saturday and Sunday.
Some people still visited the beach and took a dip in the water, but Frazier said the area smelled like an “old fish market” all weekend as the fish sat in the heat. Schoppe said his Jeep still smells dead from driving near the coast, and he’s parked it outside his garage ever since.
“My wife said, ‘No, it’s staying outside until the stench goes away,'” Schoppe said.
One of the local beaches, Quintana Beach County Park, was out of fish Monday night, its supervisor said. Frazier said fish were still showing up at other beaches Monday afternoon.
With students out of school for the summer, Frazier hopes the county’s beaches will become a relaxing destination again.
“Just because it’s a natural phenomenon doesn’t make it pleasant; it’s not something anyone wants to see,” Frazier said. “But nature has a way of bouncing back.”
