Everything's Bigger In Texas...Including the Amount of Dead Fish on the Beaches.
Hundreds of thousands of fish washed up dead along Texas beaches over the weekend as a "perfect storm" of weather, water, and temperature conditions depleted the oxygen they needed to survive.
While die-offs like these are naturally occurring, the climate crisis can make them ever more likely.
"As we see increased water temperatures, certainly this could lead to more of these events occurring," Katie St. Clair, who manages the sea life facility at Texas A&M University at Galveston, told The New York Times Sunday, "especially in our shallow, near-shore or inshore environments."
Thousands of dead fish began washing up on local beaches in Texas' Brazoria County Friday, Quintana Beach County Park wrote on Facebook. The park wrote that the fish were mostly Gulf menhaden.
The carcasses continued to wash in on Saturday. Park supervisor Patty Brinkmeyer told CNN that the dead fish numbered in the "hundreds of thousands" since Friday morning.
In her 17 years at the park, Brinkmeyer said this was "by far" the largest of the three die-offs she had observed.
"You could literally see a straight-across mass of fish floating on the water," she told CNN. "It looked like a big blanket."
In the near-term, Brazoria County Parks Department director Bryan Frazier told The New York Times that the fish kill was caused by a "perfect storm" of conditions.
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