Environment Hundreds of tons of sardines washed up in Hokkaido

An endless sea of dead sardines washed up on a beach in Southern Hokkaido, prompting speculation a school of fish was suddenly deprived of oxygen for some reason. A silver blanket of dead fish covered a roughly 1.5-kilometre stretch of shoreline around Toi fishing port. Officials estimated that at least 1,000 tons of primarily sardines but some mackerel washed ashore on 7 December but made clear the figure could be higher.

City officials warned people not to eat the fish. As the fish are covered in sand, the officials said they cannot be used as food or fertilizer for fish farming. Incineration is being considered, but the sheer mass of fish to be collected presents a daunting challenge. Takashi Fujioka, a Hakodate Fisheries Research Institute specialist attached to the Hokkaido Research Organization, said the fish were mainly Japanese sardine 15 to 22 centimeters in length and chub mackerel 27 to 37 cm in length. Fujioka said he believes the fish were on their way south to the main island of Honshu and it is possible they died en masse after they entered a low-temperature zone that mysteriously weakened and killed them.

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I hope they won't end up in supermarkets or as dog chow.

Place your bets....somewhere in China they will show this and say it's from the contaminated water.

thomas said:

An endless sea of dead sardines washed up on a beach in Southern Hokkaido, prompting speculation a school of fish was suddenly deprived of oxygen for some reason. A silver blanket of dead fish covered a roughly 1.5-kilometre stretch of shoreline around Toi fishing port. Officials estimated that at least 1,000 tons of primarily sardines but some mackerel washed ashore on 7 December but made clear the figure could be higher.

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Photo credit: Hokkaido Television Broadcasting​

Hundreds of tons of dead fish wash up in Hokkaido; experts puzzled | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

I hope they won't end up in supermarkets or as dog chow.

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Better as dog chow than being allowed to rot!

A similar incident occurred in Mie Prefecture: a large number of Japanese-scaled sardines washed up at a fishing port in Shima on the morning of 13 December, sending local fishermen scrambling into the sea to collect the small fish. The total amount of fish, called sappa in Japanese, at Nakiri fishing port in Shima is estimated to be 30 to 40 metric tons. Since their carcasses may lower the oxygen concentration in nearby waters as they decompose, affecting other sea life, local fishermen aboard two boats began netting them that morning.

It is thought that the scaled sardines were being chased by Japanese amberjack and wandered into the port, eventually running out of oxygen in the confined space. "I've never seen anything like this before," a fisherman operating in Nakiri for 25 years commented. He added, "It was only around last year that we began to catch sappa in Nakiri. It makes me feel the marine ecosystem is changing. I wonder if krill scattered by anglers on the port's levee may be affecting this."

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Meanwhile, in an article released on 8 December, the "Daily Mail" hinted at a connection between the thousands of tons of dead fish that have washed up on a Hokkaido beach and the water released from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. Japan has been battling those unsubstantiated rumours, with the Fisheries Agency expressing concern about the" unsubstantiated information".

The reason for the mass mortality is not known, but the Hokkaido Research Organization's Hakodate fisheries experiment station said fish sometimes wash up in huge numbers due to sudden water temperature changes or when they are fleeing from dolphins and other predators. The fish on the beach are believed to have been part of a school migrating south toward Honshu at this time of year, the station said.

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City officials warned people not to eat the fish. As the fish are covered in sand, the officials said they cannot be used as food or fertilizer for fish farming.

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This feels like the city officials going out of their way to find the worst solution possible.
Can't be used for fertilizer because of sand?

Considering the 1000 tons of fish, might there not be a clever way of getting the sand off?
Couldn't you put the fish in bags and distribute them to farmers and let them wash the fish?
Just feels like a colossal waste of nutrients.

Uncle Frank said:

Place your bets....somewhere in China they will show this and say it's from the contaminated water.

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I actually saw this on the news in China (we just got back the other day.). Unfortunately my Chinese is nowhere good enough to know whether they made any connection between the two.

Mikawa Ossan said:

I actually saw this on the news in China (we just got back the other day.). Unfortunately my Chinese is nowhere good enough to know whether they made any connection between the two.

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Well, the Daily Mail did make that connection. And it's enlightening to read those reader's comments.

As if all those fish swam into a cloud of tritium, and all of them were instantly irradiated and died.

Even if those fish swam through a patch of pure tritiated water, I don't know that it would produce these results.

But I know that talk of radiation turns people's brains into mush. It can't be seen, it's hard to understand, and it can be deadly and therefore people are rightly scared. But there is a strong anti-intellectual (or counter-intellectual) stream on social media that can become turbo charged. People think they are being clever by questioning the official story, or questioning the official science. You get communities of people who think they are geniuses because they form an opinion that is contrary to government or the media or academia or industry or whatever.

Like the guy in the Daily Mail comments who said to "use a guiger counter" on the fish (sic). I'll forgive the misspelling, and I'll forgive that he isn't aware that tritium isn't detected by a Geiger counter. But its the fact that he's completely ignorant yet feels confident enough to go online and talk nonsense about a slightly complex subject. And that dude got three upvotes. This is the compounding effect of ignorance on the internet.

Raising my blood pressure on this Friday morning.