Dying birds and fish: Are we living in an M. Night Shyamalan movie?

Just saw this headline from Raw Story… “Mass bird and fish deaths becoming worldwide phenomenon.”

From the link…

Birds:

The mysterious deaths of thousands of birds and fish is no longer confined to the US.

About 50 to 100 dead birds were discovered on a highway in central Sweden Tuesday. Scientists don’t know what killed the jackdaws but one veterinarian suspects they may have been frightened by fireworks and then run over by a car.

Fish:

The Brazillian site Paraná-Online noted that 100 tons of fish have turned up dead off the coast of Paraná since last Thursday.

“We will wait to see what happened, but speculations suggest that fish may have died due to an environmental imbalance, dropping a fishing boat or leakage of chemicals,” Captain Edson Oliveira Avila, regional coordinator of Civil Defense in the Paraná region, told Paraná-Online.

Then I saw this in the comments at the Raw Story link — from the Baltimore Sun — “Frigid water blamed for 2 million dead fish in Chesapeake Bay“:

An estimated 2 million fish have been reported dead from the Bay Bridge south to Tangier Sound, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment, which investigates fish kills. The dead fish are primarily adult spot, with some juvenile croakers.

One of the blackbirds that fell out of the sky on New Year's Eve lies on the ground in Beebe, AR. (Arkansas Game and Fish Commission/Handout/Reuters)

This of course is all on the heels of the mass bird deaths in AR and LA, as the Christian Science Monitor sums up:

Thousands of red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, starlings, and grackles dead in Arkansas. Five hundred more in Louisiana. Fifty jackdaws fall on a street in Stockholm. And around the world, millions of fish floating belly-up.

The CS Monitor article goes on to say:

It’s the stuff of apocalyptic novels. Scientists have not yet ruled out pollution or chemical toxins as the cause of nearly a dozen mass animal die-offs, from Arkansas to Brazil, in the last week. But as officials investigate, both the mundane and the intriguing are emerging as potential causes.

Because birds are considered indicator species that reflect the health of the surrounding environment, the spate of mass deaths has unsettled many Americans.

Over in Sweden, via thelocal.se — “Swedish birds ‘scared to death’: veterinarian“:

Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, residents found 50 to 100 jackdaws on a street in Falköping southeast of Skövde. The incident echoed a number of unexplained incidents earlier this week across the southern US.

County veterinarian Robert ter Horst believes that the birds may have been literally scared to death by fireworks set off on Tuesday night.

“We have received information from local residents last night. Our main theory is that the birds were scared away because of the fireworks and landed on the road, but couldn’t fly away from the stress and were hit by a car,” he explained to The Local on Wednesday.

I skimmed through Huffpo’s reporting on the bird and fish deaths real quick and looks like New Zealand is joining the unfortunate club.

From the NZ Herald — “Hundreds of snapper dead on beaches“:

Fisheries officials are investigating the death of hundreds of snapper washed up on Coromandel Peninsula beaches.

Beachgoers at Little Bay and Waikawau Bay found the fish – many with their eyes missing – dead on the sand yesterday.

A Department of Conservation official told Mr Hughes fish in the Coromandel area were starving because of weather conditions.

I don’t want to jump to any rash conclusions or bypass the work of experts to tease out what’s really going on here using the scientific method, but I have to say that thus far all these “official” attempts to explain what happened are sounding even hokier than the apocalyptic and government conspiracy scenarios.

I glanced over at the Scientific American to see if by chance there was anything there yet that could shed some light on what in the world is happening. I didn’t find anything on the current spate of deaths, but I found this entry on SciAm’s Extinction Countdown blog, from a week ago:

Frigid waters off the coast of Florida have killed a record number of endangered manatees this year, according to state wildlife officials. The manatee—full name, the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus)—has been protected by the Endangered Species Act since 1974.

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