Posted by In late November, thousands of dead herrings started to wash ashore the beaches in St. Marys Bay, Nova Scotia. Initially, scientists thought the most likely cause was some kind of disease, virus, parasite or a pollutant in the water that was killing off the herring. After testing the carcasses, they found no evidence of disease or pollutants that would have caused such a die off.
A month later, a swathe of other dead sea critters including starfish, lobsters, bar clams, scallops and crabs started to wash ashore as well. That pretty much ruled out disease as the diversity of the species that died suggests an environmental factor rather than a biological one. First we had herring (a single species of fish) then a bunch of bottom-dwelling animals a month later.
Then came a dead humpback whale… Oh crap, now we have dead whales washing up on the shore. Nobody really cares about dead lobsters (I’ve never seen a Greenpeace boat covered with “save the lobsters” banners) but whales? Everybody loves whales. Even the Japanese love whales although their motives are more on the culinary side than aesthetic or scientific. To be fair, the whale is probably unrelated to the other die offs and was just a coincidence but the highly decomposed body makes an expensive necropsy mostly pointless in any case.
What I said is not entirely true. There are some whackos out there who want to save lobsters as well. “King Louis”, a 23-pound live lobster was on sale at a seafood shop in Alma, New Brunswick and a 27-year old vegan Halifax woman paid $230 to buy to lobster and have it released back into the Bay of Fundy. Just as well, that big old sucker looks a little too grisly to eat in any case.
This seems to be a new trend of “save the lobsters”. In 2014, during April fools, somebody left a live lobster in a box outside a vegetarian restaurant in Ontario. The humane society “rescued” the lobster, put him in a salt water aquarium and named him Mickey. Originally, they had planned on flying Mickey back out to Nova Scotia to release him in the wild but alas, the stress of fame and all the paparazzi was too much for poor Mickey (he was also rumoured to have a substance abuse problem) and he expired in his tank overnight. I told the humane society that they had done their best and, as a good citizen, I would take Mickey’s corpse off their hand and “handle the funeral arrangements.” When questioned for further details, I said I was planning on a cremation on my BBQ.
UPDATED: Lobster dies after being found abandoned in Ontario parking lot
As to the great seafood die off in St. Marys Bay, in the end it just stopped and the scientists were left puzzled. Kent Smedbol, manager of population ecology for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) said “scientists conducted testing on the Bay of Fundy on Thursday and preliminary results for temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen came back normal… A camera scan of the bottom of St. Marys Bay also showed normal conditions and an abundance of live lobster in the area.” According to Smedbol, “while the lack of an obvious cause is ‘perplexing,’ he doesn’t personally believe there is need for concern at this point… I can’t speak for the department, personally at this point from most of the studies that have been undertaken, the evidence provided to date, I don’t think there’s a great cause for concern.” There you have it folks, the scientists have done all the testing and sampling they could think of and their conclusion is “we have no idea what happened but don’t worry”. There has been no update in well over a month so I guess we can consider this “case closed”. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
The world being the way it is today, the armchair scientists of questionable qualifications and intelligence on the internet are full of their own conspiracy theories. Here is a sample of possible reasons they cite for the fish-massacre:
- High intensity military or industrial sonar.
- Dumping of toxic waste by evil corporations and raw sewage by Montreal.
- Chemicals used by aquaculture operations to treat their own stock (variation of #2 I guess).
- Unethical fishermen using “dynamite fishing” to kill large amounts of fish.
- The new tidal turbine up the bay in Minas channel that went online just about the same time things started dying.
- Climate change (that always has to be cited as a reason these days).
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is famous for saying, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
- We can’t rule out the possibility that the evil American military are using sonar death rays on our Canadian herring but neither do we have any evidence whatsoever that there was any sort of this activity in the area. They would also have to have returned and sonar bombed the lobsters a month later just to show us they could do it.
- You would expect problems way upstream if Montreal’s daily raw sewage dump into the Saint Lawrence Seaway were to blame and you would have expected it to happen a long time ago. As for other toxins, there was no evidence of this in the samples taken.
- Again, no evidence of this in the area nor toxins or chemicals in the fish they sampled.
- Fisherman are probably going to actually catch and sell most of the fish they bomb, not let thousands and thousand die and wash up on the beach. Maybe its a bunch of teenagers going out and killing fish and lobsters for fun; kind of like a fisherman’s version of cow tipping.
- The turbine is 150 km away. Even the scientists say if this was the cause, you would expect similar events around the area, not in one localised area, and multiple fish species being affected.
- Of course climate change can be blamed for just about everything because the term is so broad and vague it covers just about every contingency.
Or maybe, just maybe, the simplest solution and reason is usually the best. “Smedbol said they’ve also consulted recent environmental data from the area. He said they don’t have anything conclusive, but a recent winter storm caused a sudden drop in temperature, down to –5 C, in the shallow areas around Digby. He said that, combined with rough surf, could have caused bottom-dwelling sea creatures to die and wash up.” Of course scientists can’t say this is the reason because, well they’re scientists and if its not conclusive, they can’t say it is. If they do, all the other scientist nerds will give them wedgies in the bathroom and beat them up in the parking lot after the symposium. Personally, I’ll put my money on this reason over all the other internet conspiracy theories any day of the week. I bet if we got Smedbol really drunk in the bar, he would babble out that winter storm cold snap was probably the cause but couldn’t say it publicly because it wasn’t “conclusive” while waving two finger quotation marks in the air.
Before I finish, I want to take one more jab at our professional journalists friend in the media. Award winning National Post reporter, Tristin Hopper, decided to take a sarcastic dig at scientists with a piece titled “The ‘duh’ studies – most obvious conclusions of 2016”.
Pets Make People Happy
This survey was funded by Ontario’s Nutram Pet Products, so it’s fair to assume that they had some kind of bias as to the final result. The company surveyed 1,000 pet owners and found that 71 per cent claimed to be happier after owning a pet. The remaining 28 per cent are presumably cat owners.
I assume that the OTHER remaining 1% are reporters who really should have taken a remedial basic math course instead of an introduction to LGBTQ rights and “politically correctness” in journalism.