Climate Change: Half A Million Mussels 'Cooked Alive' In Warm Waters Near New Zealand Coast
Friday, March 6, 2020 IST
For a New Zealand resident, a walk along the country's North Island coastline led to a shocking discovery. A man named Brandon Ferguson chanced upon thousands of dead mussels that were swept up on the shore, claim reports.
The molluscs usually found clinging to rocks littered the ground as they were cooked to death by rising temperatures. Ferguson found them earlier this month at Maunganui Bluff Beach, near the northern tip of the North Island.
Footage posted to social media shows a stunned Ferguson wading through pools choked almost knee-deep with mussel shells remarking "they're all dead...there's nothing left".
According to New Zealand Herald, Dr Andrew Jeffs, a marine scientist from the University of Auckland, said the mass deaths were caused by low tides in the middle of the day combined with ‘an exceptional period of warm weather’.
"The mussels die of heat stress. You imagine lying in the midday sun every day for four hours for the best part of a week. You'd be pretty sunburnt at the end of that," he said.
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