You’ve heard the stories about blackbirds falling out of the sky in Arkansas on New Year’s Eve. Then, we heard about 2 million fish dying in Chesapeake Bay, 150 tons of red tilapia dying in Vietnam, 40,000 crabs dying in Great Britain and the list goes on and on.
Blogs have nicknamed this the “aflockalypse”. You’ll hear that some are blaming these mass animal deaths on damage done by man to our environment. Others are trying to tie these events to biblical predictions.
Did you know that these mass
die-offs happen all the time?
If you check our federal records, you’ll see that they happen almost every other day in North America. “They generally fly under the radar,” said ornithologist John Wiens, chief scientist at the California research institution PRBO Conservation Science.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin has tracked mass deaths among birds, fish and other critters since the 1970s. 95 mass wildlife die-offs have been logged during the past eight months in North America and that’s probably a dramatic under count. They have found these deaths can sometimes be blamed on disease and other times are blamed on pollution. Many cases remain mysteries.
The USGS reports an average of 163 of these events each year. And, some of these were much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Did you know that twice, in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada?
Why Are We Hearing So Much
About This In The News Today?
Famed Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, blames technology because so many people are on the internet, have cell phones and are using worldwide communications in today’s society.
“This instant and global communication, it’s just a human instinct to read mystery and portents of dangers and wondrous things in events that are unusual. Not to worry, these are not portents that the world is about to come to an end.”
These mass die-offs usually occur in animals with large populations. Wilson is more concerned about slower mass extinction of thousands of species because human activity is ignored.
