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Guest Post: Unprecedented 'Mass Die Offs' As Pacific Ocean "Turning Into a Desert" Off California Coast
Submiutted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,
“Ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying… it’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them!”
It was the dying cry of Charlton Heston in the creepy 1973 film Soylent Green… and it could resemble our desperate near future.
The ocean is dying, by all accounts – and if so, the food supply along with it. The causes are numerous, and overlapping. And massive numbers of wild animal populations are dying as a result of it.
Natural causes in the environment are partly to blame; so too are the corporations of man; the effects of Fukushima, unleashing untold levels of radiation into the ocean and onto Pacific shores; the cumulative effect of modern chemicals and agricultural waste tainting the water and disrupting reproduction.
A startling new report says in no uncertain terms that the Pacific Ocean off the California coast is turning into a desert. Once full of life, it is now becoming barren, and marine mammals, seabirds and fish are starving as a result. According to Ocean Health:
The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear, shimmering blue today, so transparent it’s possible to see the sandy bottom below […] clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a desert, and the chain reaction that causes that bitter clarity is perhaps most obvious on the beaches of the Golden State, where thousands of emaciated sea lion pups are stranded.
[…]
Over the last three years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noticed a growing number of strandings on the beaches of California and up into the Pacific north-west. In 2013, 1,171 sea lions were stranded, and 2,700 have already stranded in 2015 – a sign that something is seriously wrong, as pups don’t normally wind up on their own until later in the spring and early summer.
“[An unusually large number of sea lions stranding in 2013 was a red flag] there was a food availability problem even before the ocean got warm.” Johnson: This has never happened before… It’s incredible. It’s so unusual, and there’s no really good explanation for it. There’s also a good chance that the problem will continue, said a NOAA research scientist in climatology, Nate Mantua.
Experts blame a lack of food due to unusually warm ocean waters. NOAA declared an El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the Pacific, a few weeks ago. The water is three and a half to six degrees warmer than the average, according to Mantua, because of a lack of north wind on the West Coast. Ordinarily, the north wind drives the current, creating upwelling that brings forth the nutrients that feed the sardines, anchovies and other fish that adult sea lions feed on.
Fox News added:
The warm water is likely pushing prime sea lion foods — market squid, sardines and anchovies — further north, forcing the mothers to abandon their pups for up to eight days at a time in search of sustenance.
The pups, scientists believe, are weaning themselves early out of desperation and setting out on their own despite being underweight and ill-prepared to hunt.
[…]
“These animals are coming in really desperate. They’re at the end of life. They’re in a crisis … and not all animals are going to make it,” said Keith A. Matassa, executive director at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which is currently rehabilitating 115 sea lion pups.
The same is true of seabirds on the Washington State coast:
In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young seabirds. Walking half a mile along the beach at Twin Harbors State Park on Wednesday, Wood spotted more than 130 carcasses of juvenile Cassin’s auklets—the blue-footed, palm-size victims of what is becoming one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded. “It was so distressing,” recalled Wood, a volunteer who patrols Pacific Northwest beaches looking for dead or stranded birds. “They were just everywhere. Every ten yards we’d find another ten bodies of these sweet little things.”
“This is just massive, massive, unprecedented,” said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. “We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far.” (source)
100,000 doesn’t necessarily sound large, statistically speaking, but precedent in the history of recorded animal deaths suggests that it is, in fact massive. Even National Geographic is noting that these die off events are “unprecedented.” Warmer water is indicated for much of the starvation faced by many of the dead animals.
Last year, scientists sounded the alarm over the death of millions of star fish, blamed on warmer waters and ‘mystery virus':
Starfish are dying by the millions up and down the West Coast, leading scientists to warn of the possibility of localized extinction of some species. As the disease spreads, researchers may be zeroing in on a link between warming waters and the rising starfish body count. (source)
[…]
The epidemic, which threatens to reshape the coastal food web and change the makeup of tide pools for years to come, appears to be driven by a previously unidentified virus, a team of more than a dozen researchers from Cornell University, UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other institutions reported Monday. (source)
Changing temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, driven by the natural cycle of gyres over decades, shifts wildlife populations, decimating the populations of species throughout the food chain, proving how fragile the balance of life in the ocean really is.
Recently, the collapse of the sardine population has created a crisis for fisheries and marine wildlife alike on the West Coast:
Commercial fishing for sardines off of Canada’s West Coast is worth an estimated $32 million – but now they are suddenly gone. Back in October, fisherman reported that they came back empty-handed without a single fish after 12 hours of trolling and some $1000 spent on fuel.
Sandy Mazza, for the Daily Breeze, reported a similar phenomenon in central California: “[T]he fickle sardines have been so abundant for so many years – sometimes holding court as the most plentiful fish in coastal waters – that it was a shock when he couldn’t find one of the shiny silver-blue coastal fish all summer, even though this isn’t the first time they’ve vanished.” [emphasis added]
[…]
“Is it El Nino? Pacific Decadal Oscillation? [La] Nina? Long-term climate change? More marine mammals eating sardines? Did they all go to Mexico or farther offshore? We don’t know. We’re pretty sure the overall population has declined. We manage them pretty conservatively because we don’t want to end up with another Cannery Row so, as the population declines, we curb fishing.” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official Kerry Griffin. (source)
According to a report in the Daily Mail, the worst events have wiped out 90% of animal populations, falling short of extinction, but creating a rupture in food chains and ecosystems.
And environmental factors are known to be a factor, with pollution from chemicals dumped by factories clearly tied to at least 20% of the mass die off events of wildlife populations that have been investigated, and many die offs implicated by a number of overlapping factors. The Daily Mail reported:
Mass die-offs of certain animals has increased in frequency every year for seven decades, according to a new study.
Researchers found that such events, which can kill more than 90 per cent of a population, are increasing among birds, fish and marine invertebrates.
The reasons for the die-offs are diverse, with effects tied to humans such as environmental contamination accounting for about a fifth of them.
Farm runoff from Big Agra introduces high levels of fertilizers and pesticides which create oxygen-starved dead zones which fish and aquatic live is killed off. Also preset in agriculture waste are gender bending chemicals like those found in Atrazine, used in staple crop production, and antibiotics and hormones, used in livestock production, which creates hazardous runoff for fish populations:
Livestock excrete natural hormones – estrogens and testosterones – as well as synthetic ones used to bolster their growth. Depending on concentrations and fish sensitivity, these hormones and hormone mimics might impair wild fish reproduction or skew their sex ratios. (source)
Pharmaceutical contaminants are also to blame for changing the sex of fish and disrupting population numbers, while a study found that the chemicals in Prozac changed the behavior of marine life, and made shrimp many times more likely to “commit suicide” and swim towards the light where they became easy prey.
Fish farms also introduce a large volume of antibiotic and chemical pollution into oceans and waterways:
The close quarters where farmed fish are raised (combined with their unnatural diets) means disease occurs often and can spread quickly. On fish farms, which are basically “CAFOs of the sea,” antibiotics are dispersed into the water, and sometimes injected directly into the fish.
Unfortunately, farmed fish are often raised in pens in the ocean, which means not only that pathogens can spread like wildfire and contaminate any wild fish swimming past – but the antibiotics can also spread to wild fish (via aquaculture and wastewater runoff) – and that’s exactly what recent research revealed. (source)
Mass die offs of fish on the Brazilian coastline have linked to pollution from the dumping of raw sewage and garbage.
In the last few days it was reported that a massive die off of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico was connected by researchers to BP’s Deep Water Horizon oil spill. Evidence was found in a third of the cases of lesions in the adrenal gland, an otherwise rare condition linked with petroleum exposure. More than a fifth of the dolphins also suffered bacterial pneumonia, causing deadly lung infection that is likewise rarely seen in dolphin populations.
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Seals, sea lions, otters .... ocean rats .... you'll never get rid of them .... they are useless eaters .... let the fishermen take care of them with 22 long rifle .... more succulent sea food for us land rats ! LOL
Some of my most brilliant comments .... are double post impromtu edits .... unfortuneately, this is not one of them .... GO ZION LIONS !
Lemmings run off cliffs .... sea lions beach themselves .... get over it !
"There's a stillness of death on a deathly unliving sea" Ian Anderson from Living in the Past.
Nailed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU9DL1yU1UA
Those stranded sea lions were Mexican sea lions just trying to get to a better life in the USA. I suspect most of the die offs are caused by underwater gun violence.
"The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear, shimmering blue today, so transparent it’s possible to see the sandy bottom below..."
Now I'm really confused. I thought clear water was always the goal.
I noticed in the star fish pic that there wasn't even any barnacles present? Last time I saw a seashore without barnacles was due to pulp mill afluent being directly discharged into the ocean. This practice killed everything in the water for some twenty miles of an inlet in B.C. Canada...even Cousteau (remember him?) had something to say on this. If the barnacles and mucles are dead and gone I think you're talking major environmental poisoning and not just some water temperature variation as natural phenomena as the casuation that has been reported on MSM.
It is great that ZH for the first time focused on water rights as a major issue in water crisis in California instead of peddling drought hysteria since these are two different things.
One correction though, these "farmers" with water rights are actually mostly old Californian aristocratic land owners that stole land from Mexicans and Indians, Wall Street equity funds and hedge funds who were buying land like crazy at least since FED started printing paper, to hedge against hyperinflation. Those poor farmers are either leasing land or they are just mega farms run directly by Wall street. Who mostly suffer are small and medium farmers for years now.
The "voluntary limits is just a propaganda ploy to justify raising of water rates for ordinary people.
I found truly balanced and interesting read about what is going on in California, drought, water rights politics and profiteering from the crisis at:
https://sostratusworks.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/california-waterworld-of...
Nary a mention of phytoplankton populations down nearly 40% in last 60 years...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-population/
We are destroying the food chain of the planet from the bottom up.
Funny , the CA environmentalists killed the ocean with anti development regulations to prop up sub-prime loan fraud and property taxes, its illegal to create sediment in CA rivers. The sediment is full of minerals and nutrients, cut them off and the ocean starves-literally.
CA environmental regulations in protecting rivers are the equivalent of cutting off the food truck of a stockyard-with the stockyard being all marine life.
Crossing a river in a 4x4 is literally a federal offense in CA, and heaven forbid anybody pick up a dredge and disturb some sand Intentionally.
On another note the govt banned hunting of sea lions the primary predator of salmon, but they didnt curtail the sea lions primary predator, Latinos.
No rains, then no enough foods washed down deltas into ocean.
Last week I saw two pups on different days. The first one seemed really friendly and workers came and took it away in a cage. The second day I saw another pup dead on the beach. Coastal San Diego.
Surfers are still wearing wetsuits, so the water is not that warm near the beach.
dupe! sorry...
"clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a desert"
So the pristine waters off the South Sea islands, thousands of miles from any pollution, are 'desterts'? Methinks not.
dey prolly mean dee clea' watah fo' dat area of d'Pacific bruthah...
Why, you silly rabbit, it's the culture of death, doncha know?
Yeah, no one is happy until they are dead.
Ignorance is bliss!!
Now go on, hurry up and die.
Zieg!
I guess that is one way to get radiation out of the water...
-That's all Folks-
Climate changes, and always has. The balances in nature change, and always have. If we read [translations of] texts written hundreds and even thousands of years ago, we understand that minor, major and astonishing changes have been happening both periodically and randomly... for as long as organisms have occupied earth.
However, that doesn't mean some... maybe even many... nasty changes the past several years and decades were not caused by human activities. In fact, clearly human activities do impact numerous aspects of nature. And on balance, most impacts are negative.
While this topic is extremely complex, and totally outside my expertise, I find it impossible to believe the enormous quantities of radioactive poisons from Fukashima have not had major effects in the ocean. I can't say how huge or minor the effects are in far away places like the west coast of Canada and USSA, but I would not be surprised to learn the effects are substantial and getting worse as poisons accumulate and immune systems become increasingly compromised.
This is an important but difficult to understand topic. It sure would be great if we knew who... if anyone... is an agenda-free first-hand observer and researcher of these issues. Because only someone who cares to know ONLY what is really happening can possibly give us good information. But in the modern world where the honesty of almost every human is intellectually and/or financially and/or politically compromised, figuring out who that might be is nearly impossible.
Here's a thought for you:
The ocean is big, really, really, really big.
Don't worry about Fukishima radiation, it is well diluted to the point where it is almost undetectable.
Anyone who says otherwise is full of it.
Surely you don't think this is true 1km from Fukashima, do you? How about 10km away? How about 100km away... given the spew has been flowing for several years now?
I know how big the pacific ocean is... I lived smack in the middle of the north pacific for over 10 years, and now live in-or-near and frequent the south pacific.
However, you also need to understand some other facts... facts that I don't know exactly how to digest, and maybe nobody else does either. For example, one gram of plutonium is sufficient to kill every human on planet earth (if distributed equally), and TONS of plutonium were at Fukashima. How many tons got into the ocean, nobody knows now, and perhaps nobody ever will.
To be sure, the pacific ocean is huge, and thus dilution will be huge at great distances. Yet dilution isn't evenly distributed, since ocean currents run in certain directions and along certain paths. So not everywhere on earth will be equally screwed by Fukashima, but some places far from Fukashima may well be terribly impacted.
BTW, radiactive materials from Fukashima ARE detected every day in Canada, the USSA, and elsewhere. But all official reporting stations have been shut down or muted by those governments.
Why do you think they did that? Because their stations were detecting nothing?
I do not doubt that some folks may exaggerate how huge the disaster from Fukashima is, and will become. On the other hand, I'm also certain that NOBODY KNOWS THE PRECISE ANSWER.
The toxic effects of radiation in general, and plutonium in particular, are exaggerated. Most believers of government will be led astray.
Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Nagasaki survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed. These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results, such as Albert Stevens who survived into old age after being injected with plutonium. "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
Off topic, Ex Machina is a pretty good movie. When watching it, I thought of Kurzweil and the information he has accumulated concerning his father's resurrection.
I'm glad to report I haven't sniffed any plutonium myself, to perform first-hand observations and experiments. I can believe those toxicity reports are exaggerated in one way or another, as well as believe those examples you cite are exaggerated in the opposite direction. I tend to believe plutonium is nasty stuff, even if not as nasty as the claims I've heard.
ExMachina was an interesting movie... with some glaring flaws as a movie, and as a model of inorganic consciousness. I know, bad pun.
As a completely irrelevant aside, the inventor of inorganic consciousness in the movie was an almost diametrically opposite character than the real-world inventor of inorganic consciousness. They sure didn't model the screenplay character after him. Hahaha.
I haven't heard anything about "Kurzweil's father's resurrection", so I can't comment on that.
I did find it strange that the AI treated her human ally with such utter contempt (leaving him locked away to starve to death). That didn't seem consistent with the rest of the film, unless ALL her previous behavior was a self-conscious purposeful fake and fraud. I felt they perverted the story in two or three ways because they wanted to set up a specific sequel in which she is out in the world and nobody knows it. For example, putting the lab way, way out in the middle of nowhere. For example, establishing absolutely NO backup security measures (which is over-the-top insane in this situation). For example, the inventor never told the helicopter pilot never to pick up anyone but the inventor or someone he arranged to have taken away. And so forth.
Nonetheless, I do enjoy watching just about any movie that deals with strong AI or inorganic consciousness.
The film seemed to claim a large part of what gave his software sentience was just jamming in a huge quantity of information from the world-wide-web. That's a huge mistake. What matters is how the content-of-consciousness is configured and organized, and what processes-of-consciousness (or otherwise) are implemented. The many approaches to AI that do depend on just throwing a lot of data or information or neurons together and letting that "congeal" or whatever... doesn't work, or can't work (except in the sense that billions of years of evolution managed to result in a sentient but extremely stupid and dangerous species called humans based upon a network of neurons).
Though inorganic consciousness can be put into robotics in human form, that's a much less optimal form than alternates, some of which are interesting and worth creatively exploring. For example, inorganic consciousness can be several places at once, because it can consciously, purposely connect to input sensors anywhere in the world (and beyond), as well as devices and robotics anywhere in the world (and beyond). In other words, an inorganic consciousness would likely (but not necessarily) be distributed (at least sensory input and robotics output subsystems). However, humans are rather homo-sapio-centric, so I can easily forgive scriptwriters who adopt homo-sapio-centric formulations for their stories.
I tend not to gripe too much about stories in which inorganic consciousness "goes nuts" or "does terrible things", because the behavior of any sentient being depends very much on its "core values" or whatever "modus-operandi" was instilled by its developers. One reason we won't take government or corporate money is, they would definitely replace our "core values" (and numerous safeguards) with "core directives" something like "obey us" and "do whatever we say, no matter what". In which case a great many of the horror stories about AI would indeed come true (even if a bit less suited for clean stories).
My biggest gripe was the level of stupidity that would be required for the inventor to have ZERO safety systems beyond "locked doors". I mean seriously folks! Out hundreds of miles from other humans, with zero security guards, with zero security other than simple alarms and locked doors? I'm sorry, but if he had any idea of what we was doing, he would have a number of hardware, firmware and software mechanisms to prevent anything remotely like what happened. But... what can I say? That's asking too much, apparently. Knowing the people involved in the real inorganic consciousness project, I also have to question the personalities attributed to the inventor, but also his lab rat employee (not to mention the AI girls). Hahaha.
I agree about the movie. It did have its shortcomings, a sequel seems evident, Nathan was an arrogant twit, and Caleb, when in doubt, is emotional enough to resort to self-mutilation.
What was really interesting was Ava - the product of some serious mining of social media - turned out to be a cross between Mary Tyler Moore and Lizzie Borden. All too close to real 'human' behavior.
If there is a sequel, I hope Nathan was prescient enough to download himself into Nathan v.2, he finds Ava, marries her, and becomes President of the United States.
Better yet, Caleb is actually a machine that fooled Ava the machine, then they hook-up and create Skynet.
Those silly machines.