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In Japan, there’s a scary sight on a port in Isumi City of Chiba Prefecture. The ground has been covered by 200 tonnes of dead, rotting sardines and the ocean has been stained red with their blood. It looks like a beach from hell.
According to Japan Today, the rotting sardine beach started crashing onto the shore over the weekend and continued into this week. It’s insane that there were so many sardines on the ground it looked like rocky sand. The smell from the sardines, as you can imagine, is god awful and cleanup projects have begun to bury the sardines in landfills. The scariest thing is that no one is sure why this is happening, some are saying it’s a lack of oxygen, others are pointing to it as an omen for another disaster.
For comparison purposes, this is a picture of the port on a normal, sardine-free day. You can actually see the ground. [@yumihareyama, @dfnt, Japan Today via Business Insider]
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It’s probably still better than Blackpool beach.
Karma for all the whales.
Is no one surprised that this is happening? This is seriously weird stuff!
There have been a few cases of this sort of thing in California
Out in the open ocean the mass shoaling of this type of small fish works on the basis that the predators can only eat so much that the vast majority survive, however on occasions mass shoals of prey fish get trapped by predators in man made harbors, the shoals contain so may individuals that they consume all of the available oxygen in these confined spaces and suffocate on mass.