You may think it's unbearably hot where you live, but at least humans get to enjoy air conditioning. Not so for our water-bound friends.
Soaring temperatures likely killed an estimated 2,000 striped mullet fish in Southern California last week, LiveScience reported Thursday.
The waters in Malibu Lagoon and Malibu Creek reached up to 82 degrees Fahrenheit last week, which has California State Parks officials suspecting that it simply got too hot for the poor fish to take. Craig Sap, the superintendent of California State Parks' Angeles District, said it was the biggest mass-fish-mortality event he'd ever seen.
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Scientists say climate change has brought increasingly extreme heat to California, and this summer has been plagued by wildfires worsened by record-high temperatures across the state. The sizzling temperatures have brought unprecedented heat even to the coast, where weather is typically mild.
The lagoon-turned-hot-tub likely cooked the striped mullet to death, says LiveScience, and now officials are figuring out what to do with thousands of deceased fish bodies that are floating in the waters. State Parks staff have begun removing them — to predictably disastrous results. "The smell now that we're moving them is pretty odoriferous," said Sap. Read more at LiveScience.
