Mass Fish Death on Texas Beach Attributed to Low Oxygen Levels in Water

It was a wild sight to say the least that greeted beachgoers in Texas last weekend.

On Friday last week, tens of thousands of dead fish were found on a beach in Texas, USA, the newspaper writes The Guardian.

The reason must be too little dissolved oxygendissolved oxygenThe amount of gaseous oxygen in water. In order for water to support life, it depends on dissolved oxygen. in the water that made it difficult to breathe for the large flow of fish, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Service told the newspaper.

The phenomenon goes by the name “fish death” and is common when the temperature rises in summer.

It was waves from the Gulf of Mexico that washed the fish carcasses ashore in Brazoria County, which is more than 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Houston, local officials said.

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Local officials were forced to ask visitors to stay away.

– Our recommendation is to stay away from the beach until the fish stop flowing in. We would definitely ask that no one go into the water, Quintana Beach County Park wrote on its Facebook page Saturday.

Although no one has concretely linked the incident to climate change, several researchers have explained that such mass deaths may become more widespread as temperatures rise and the oxygen level in the water in the US and Europe falls, writes The Guardian.

At low temperatures, the water contains more dissolved oxygen, this because the oxygen molecules have less movement. In warmer water, the oxygen molecules will move faster, which can result in them escaping from the water into the air

Quintana Beach has reportedly been cleared of most of the dead fish, except for some that the machines could not remove, local officials report.

It was the fish type Brevoortia patronus (Gulf menhanden) that suffered the most deaths on the beach. Menhanden is a species of fish in the herring family.