Tens of thousands of dead fish wash ashore on Gulf Coast in Texas

Tens of thousands of fish washed ashore along the Gulf coast of Texas starting Friday after being starved of oxygen in warm water, officials said.

Park officials for Brazoria County said that a cleanup effort was underway but thousands more fish were expected to wash ashore.

Officials for Quintana Beach County Park published photos Saturday showing scores of dead fish floating in the coastal waters.

The cause was a “perfect storm” of bad conditions, said Bryan Frazier, the director of the Brazoria County Parks Department.

Warm water holds much less oxygen than cold water, he said, and calm seas and cloudy skies in the area had stymied the ways oxygen is usually infused into ocean water. Waves add oxygen to water, and cloudy skies reduce the ability of microscopic organisms to produce oxygen through photosynthesis.

When schools of fish are trapped in shallow, warm water, they can start to act erratically as they are starved of oxygen, which further depletes oxygen in the water.

Katie St. Clair, the sea life facility manager at Texas A&M University at Galveston, said the warming of Gulf Coast waters through climate change could have contributed to the fish kill.

“As we see increased water temperatures, certainly this could lead to more of these events occurring,” St. Clair said, “especially in our shallow, nearshore or inshore environments.”

The National Weather Service recorded a high of 92 degrees in Brazoria County on Friday, the day the dead fish were first reported washing ashore.

A United Nations report concluded in 2019 that warming ocean water had increased incidences of hypoxia – or low oxygen levels – in coastal waters, threatening fish populations.

In addition to localized cases of hypoxia, a large “dead zone” of water spanning thousands of square miles is known to form in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer months.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast on Monday that this dead zone would be smaller than usual this year, covering about 4,155 square miles of coastal waters.

St. Clair said the fish kill could have a significant environmental impact because the dead fish – mostly Gulf menhaden – play a “critical role” in the local ecosystem.

“You could see cascading impacts if we continue to have these large fish kills,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.