Hama Hama Oyster Company, a fifth-generation, family-run shellfish farm in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, recorded scores of cooked clams on the muddy banks of the Salish Sea, reports Molly Taft for Gizmodo. Shellfish are vital to the economy in the region, and shellfish farmers have made similar observations of the heat wave ravaging their livestock. They’re also important food sources to larger animals such as seabirds. They filter seawater and keep the water clean. The devastation of shellfish such as mussels, oysters and clams can have dire impacts on the ecosystem. They're at the mercy of the environment.” “They are stuck there until the parent comes back, or in this case, the tide comes back in, and there's very little they can do. "A mussel on the shore in some ways is like a toddler left in a car on a hot day," Harley says to CBC. But the combined effects of peak heat of the day coinciding with the afternoon’s low tide were too much for the mussels to muscle through. Normally, the water they hold should be enough to act as a thermal buffer, so they can tolerate temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit for short periods of time, according to Harley. At low tide, mussels on land snap shut and retain a small puddle of water in their shells so as not to dry out, reports Sammy Westfall and Amanda Coletta for the Washington Post. As the tides rise and retreat, they become submerged underwater or exposed to direct sunlight. Mussels spend their whole lives rooted in one spot on the edge of the coast. Harley estimates the death toll of seashore animals along the Salish Sea coastline is over a billion. Harley’s team used infrared cameras to measure similar temperatures on the rocky shoreline where the sea creatures once lived. Temperatures soared to a record-breaking 121 degrees Fahrenheit in British Columbia that weekend. In particular, the mussels had split open, their freshly baked flesh still nestled inside. On Vancouver’s Kitsilano Beach where Harley stood, tens of thousands of dead mussels, clams, sea stars, barnacles and snails blanketed the sea rocks as far along the coastline as his eye could see. “I was pretty stunned,” says Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, to the CBC's Alex Migdal. Beach goers, some who had headed to the water to cool off, were greeted with putrid stench of shellfish baking in the sun.
During late June’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada, sea creatures on the coast were cooked alive by the millions in the scorching heat.
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