Billions of dead anchovies clog Redondo Beach harbor; die-off cause a mystery

"Yesterday everything looked absolutely normal. This morning when I got up, there were millions and millions of them floating everywhere." Walter Waite, who lives at Redondo Beach harbor, on the billions of dead anchovies blanketing the sea bottom and floating on the surface of the water this morning at King Harbor. So far, the cause is a mystery. The photos are creepy.

• [jonathanpeterson]

  People commenting on the article apparently can’t be bothered with facts – it’s signs of the end times, industrial pollution and/or Obama.

  • [millrick]

    Obama is stealing our oxygen?!?

    • [Lidok]

      Didn’t you know he is an alien and his wife is a clone? they can do these things. Just wait till they destroy all carbon

      • [millrick]

        carbon too?
        – this is worse than i thought

    • [travtastic]

      When he gives all the black people free cars, there are compressed air tanks included in the trunk!

  • [kpkpkp]

    but of course

  • [mdh]

    Did Charlie Sheen go for a midnight swim and suck all the oxygen out of the harbor?

  • [jrlogue]

    I particularly enjoyed the following comments:

    “i dont no why or what is going on with the fish!!! but i do no what the bible says.. and i no it hard to grasp for all of us that love the world but it’s here.. open your eye .. ears .. and harts … it time to change r wases be for its to late …”

    “sorry. the world isnt going to end and save you from your awful spelling anytime soon…”

    • [Brainspore]

      If I was inclined to go with a biblical explanation here, mine would be that Jesus showed up to do his “feeding the crowd with two fishes” bit but nobody was in the mood for sardines this time.

      • [jrlogue]

        BYOB (“bring your own bread”)

• [Anonymous]

  It’ll happen to Homo unSapien too, with our own set of circumstances some day, and we won’t be joking about it as we enter that bright light – except for the most sociopathic among us (of which there are many).

• [Anonymous]

  all that free fertilizer!

• [mdh]

  wasn’t actually a reply, c’est la vie.

• [Avram / Moderator]

  The Decapodians have arrived!

• [oschene]

  It wasn’t because I injected food dye into their eggs, was it? ‘Cause those rainbow baby fish were kind of cute.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Yippee! Now you too can smell like the Salton Sea, where the beaches are made of fish bones.

• [James]

  I grew up on the water. Looks like a red tide is coming. If so, they will soon see lots more fish — including large fish, like sharks, sting rays and barracuda — fleeing the red tide.

  • [mdh]

    I grew up reading the article.

  • [tedder]

    James, they already ruled out a red tide. Looks like a die-off, red tides are only one of the causes.

• [MrScience]

  My first thought was really? Billions?
  Given that these are likely pilchards (who knew) that range around 20cm (found here, via), and it looks like there’s a (underestimating) 6-to-1 ratio length-to-height, and assuming the fish will spread out to be no more than one layer deep…

  20cm * 1Billion * 3cm * 1Billion = 6.6*10^19 cm.
  sqrt(hugenumber) = 81 square kilometers of floating fish.

  Are my maths wrong? That, indeed, seems like a newsworthy story!

  • [Anonymous]

    Your math seems wrong, but it’s hard to what you were trying to do it. Why did you multiply cm * cm to get cm instead of cm^2, and then take a square root to get km^2? Where did the second billion come from?

• [MrScience]

  Oh, and of course that was only for one billion. Contra Costa said it was billions. :)

• [Anonymous]

  A few more photos (better ones, IMHO :-), in case anybody’s interested: http://t.co/Ma6h4wN

• [Donald Petersen]

  Just took a peek at the pictures. Man, there’s an awful lot of them in there, all packed together so tightly like… like… a bunch of small fish packed together. Like maybe you’d see in a can of… of… uh, small fish.

  Anchovies?

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Something about this article smells fishy to me.

• [ChshreCat]

  It’s gonna take a LOT of saltine crackers to clean that up.

• [genre slur]

  Serves those fish right. They were in the way of progress.

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Hey the LA TV media is on the scene, so it’s all gonna be OK.

  http://www.ktla.com/videobeta/863f6de7-b8f1-4595-9c9a-9e1945d2a23e/News/KTLA-Millions-of-Fish-Dead-In-Redondo-Beach-Alex-Calder-reports

  As to solutions:

  Where is that Dr Zoidberg when he’s needed?

  …paging Dr Zoidberg….paging Dr Zoidberg….Dr Zoidberg is needed at the marina….

• [Rob Gehrke]

  In Marseille, France, where people have a habit of exaggerating everything, there exists an urban legend wherein long ago a giant sardine blocked the entrance to the Old Harbor. True story. I don’t know what’s worse, one big one or many little ones.

• [bjacques]

  They were probably working for scale.

• [hobomike]

  What a waste! Them anchovies are delish!

  I think billions, even millions, are probably an exaggeration but what a great sign of the recovery of SM Bay! (I’m siding with the lack of oxygen story.)

• [millrick]

  sardines, apparently, but ick nevertheless

  • [snouty]

    yeah first thing I noticed was the complete lack of anchovies in the story. If it was a pizza I woulda sent it back.

    My favourite comment was the guy who said “birds and fish dying… people unable to spell, random inaccurate bible references.. yep, end of days is upon us.” haha

    That many small fish in a confined space? Like the man said they suffocated. Tragic.

• [Anonymous]

  Yeah, it’s really a mystery as to why these kinds of things happen when we are not at all willing to change our lifestyles one bit to care for nature. It’s such a terrifying concept that we reject it either as “it’s not that bad” or “i don’t care”, whatever the costs.

• [Anonymous]

  more phosgene.

• [tedder]

  Initial results indicate oxygen deprivation.
  http://j.mp/e7oPWU