Joe Gaydos found a bluefin tuna washed up on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington state. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the fish usually roam the more temperate waters of the Pacific Ocean.
We saw over 100 on a 1/2 mile stretch of beach. I am wondering if the chiton die-off is related to the stormy conditions or something else?
It would be an obscure sighting of the species. The closest beluga population, which lives at least 1,400 miles away in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, is endangered and covered under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
If upwelling starts a month earlier than usual, the amount of oxygen, already low, has to last until the fall when storms promote mixing which adds oxygen back into the system. As of late September this year, upwelling is still occurring and low levels of oxygen are still persisting.
Nearly 30 transient orcas were spotted in the Salish Sea around British Columbia and Washington state over the Labor Day weekend, a positive sign for the species, according to local whale watchers and researchers.
The most common pod of southern resident killer whales who migrate to the Salish Sea during the summer have not been seen for than 100 days, marking a highly unusual absence from their historic summer hunting ground, according to researchers.
A record-shattering heat wave June 26-28 coincided with some of the year's lowest tides on Puget Sound. The combination was lethal for millions of mussels, clams, oysters, sand dollars, barnacles, sea stars, moon snails, and other tideland creatures exposed to three afternoons of intense heat.
Some 22,950 sockeye were counted at Ballard’s Hiram Chittenden Locks in 2020, but only about 3,000 made it to the mouth of the Cedar. Another 40 to 50% of those fish typically die on the spawning grounds before they can reproduce.A vortex of climate change, urbanization and predators endangers a beloved species.
A rare deep-sea fish was discovered on Vancouver Island this month. A pair of friends, Natalie Mueller and Andie Lafrentz, were walking along Whiffin Spit in Sooke on Sept. 19 when they spotted what they first thought was a “large piece of scrap metal.”
It was a king-of-the-salmon (Trachipterus altivelis), a deep-sea-dwelling species of ribbonfish. Its common name comes from the legends of the Makah people west of Strait of Juan de Fuca, which believe this “king” leads the salmon to their spawning grounds each year.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said photographer Marissa Baecker, who was visiting White Rock from Kelowna on Christmas Day. “It wasn’t just a feeding, it was a feast.”
People in White Rock, B.C. are used to seeing fish in their waters but not quite like this.
Professor John Reynolds shared the following video of his observation of a large aggregation of gulls and other coastal seabirds over a large aggregation of Northern Anchovy at White Rock, BC.
The bird flew in on the mudflats at high tide and joined a small flock of Western Sandpipers. This is the second record for the province of BC.
Southern resident killer whales which are often spotted in the Salish Sea near Vancouver throughout June haven't been seen this season, and scientists believe that could be because of the lack of chinook salmon.
Researchers say their absence is a stark reminder that the orcas are slowly starving to death because there is not enough Chinook salmon to sustain them.
A dead grey whale was found floating in Boundary Bay, near the United States border, this week. It's the sixth grey whale to have been found dead in B.C. waters this year.
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