Modern Mysteries

70,000 dead fish wash up in Marina del Rey

By T.K. Randall
May 20, 2014 ·  48 comments

The view across Marina del Rey . Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Howcheng The alarm was raised on Saturday evening when police officers were called to investigate the appearance of tens of thousands of dead anchovies, sting rays, angel sharks and other species floating in the water off the marina.

The most prominent current theory among marine experts is that the animals died due to oxygen deprivation caused by a sudden bloom of algae in the hot weather."Inside the marina here you have the sea walls that make it a confined space, so there's only a certain amount of oxygen in the water immediate to the fish," said bait expert Mike Spears. "It was a low tide, which means the water was going out, nothing was coming in from the ocean, so it was just stale water and they just suffocated in it, and everything around them suffocated, too."

Workers spent Sunday afternoon hauling away the dead sea animals that together weighed an estimated 7,000 pounds and filled over 175 garbage bags.

Source: NBC Los Angeles | Comments (48)

Tags: Fish, Los Angeles