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A dead spotted seal washed up on Khalaktyrskiy Beach, in Russia’s Far East
By Onlykhabar News Media
Sun 18 October, 2020 ( about 5 years ago )
🎤1001 Viewersstory
A dead spotted seal washed up on Khalaktyrskiy Beach, in Russia’s Far East, along with mounds of lifeless sea urchins, starfish, and other bottom-dwellers.
A seaward wind was whipping up the waves, and at 54 degrees Fahrenheit, the water was warmer than even the air. Conditions were ideal for surfing, at least by the standards of the “land of fire and ice,” Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, in the far east. The surfers first blamed it on the sun’s glare or buffeting winds. As they began to suffer nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and fever in the ensuing days, however, they realized the poison was in the ocean itself. But half an hour after Katya Dyba, an administrator at Snowave, a local surf school on the Pacific coast, came in from riding the crests, her vision began to blur, and her throat became sore. One of her co-workers couldn't open his eyes. In total, 16 people went to the hospital; several were diagnosed with corneal burns.
Beachgoers picked up limp red octopuses by their tentacles. Meanwhile mounds of lifeless sea urchins and starfish were washing up on Kamchatka’s eastern shores. “My reaction was absolute bewilderment, because we’re used to the water at Khalaktyrskiy Beach always being very clean, and nothing like this had ever happened before,” says Dyba, who is still suffering eye dryness a month later. Thousands of dead fish, mostly bottom feeders, were found on Kamchatka’s western shore this week, and several brown bears suffered severe food poisoning after eating them—just one example of the potential ripple effects this mass marine life die-off could cause.
That raises even more troubling questions about how climate change is affecting one of the planet's most biodiverse marine environments, home to endangered species such as steelhead trout and sea otters. While many initially suspected pollution, scientists now say the deaths were probably caused by an algal bloom. “We didn’t expect that the area of algal blooming [would] be so massive,” says Kirill Vinnikov, a marine biologist at the Far Eastern Federal University. Hanging off Russia’s Pacific coast like a droopy tail, Kamchatka has the highest concentration of active volcanoes on Earth.
Unable to swim away from contaminated waters, these bottom-dwelling organisms have been dying in the greatest numbers. “A vital element of this ecosystem has suddenly fallen out,” says Vasily Yablokov, Greenpeace Russia’s climate project manager, who has been taking samples in Kamchatka. But none of these concentrations, nor the wastewater dumped by a passing ship on September 23, seemed large enough to explain the sweeping die-off. Last week, scientists flew over the coast looking for clues. They spotted swaths of yellow, green, and red water suggestive of an algal bloom. “We flew 100 kilometers to the south of Kamchatka, and we observed this kind of discoloration of the water almost along the whole coastal area,” he says. “The whole coastal zone is infected.” Scientists are now calling for more water quality monitoring in Kamchatka after what Burkanov calls both “a red tide and a red alert.” “If it’s really a red tide of a scale never observed before, then it's a real warning,” he says. “And that’s even worse than local pollution from some chemicals.”
