Warm water killing fish in Mat-Su and Anchorage

[Panich52]

Alaska Dispatch

Warm water killing fish in Mat-Su and Anchorage
  
Water temperatures of 70 degrees or more are to blame for salmon kills in Mat-Su creeks and large die-off of Arctic char in Anchorage, according to state officials. 

Alaska News | Sean Doogan
Read more
http://www.adn.com/article/20150813/warm-water-killing-fish-mat-su-and-anchorage

[Divernan]

1. Happening in the Aleutians too.

Dead Fish, Wildlife In Aleutians May Be Victims Of Toxic Algae Outbreak

By John Ryan
Friday, July 24 2015

(Photo Caption: Melissa Good with UAF Alaska Sea Grant collects a sample from a Steller's sea lion carcass by Unalaska's Summer Bay. KUCB/John Ryan photo)

Scientists have been receiving reports of dead and dying mammals, birds and small fish in the Aleutian Islands. They think the killer might be toxic algae proliferating in unusually warm ocean waters.

“All the signs are that we’re having a major harmful algal bloom event,” Bruce Wright with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association said. Wright said it could be the algae that cause paralytic shellfish poisoning; the algae that generate domoic acid are another possible culprit.

Melissa Good with University of Alaska Fairbanks has been looking for the microscopic green suspects around Unalaska.

“They’re a suspected cause for some of the mass deaths we’ve been seeing--the 10 fin whales that were spotted dead off of Kodiak Island; I know Adak has seen a lot of dead birds, King Cove, I believe [birds in] False Pass have been washing up. We don’t know the cause of that yet either,” Good said. “In the past, we’ve seen incidences where sand lance, a little plankton-eating fish, was accumulating these high toxins from these algae in their system. The birds were eating sand lance, these small forage fish, and were dying. No one that I know of is sure what happened.”