More than 100 miles from the site of weird blackbird deaths in Arkansas, 100,000 drum fish are floating on the river. They are also found dead! Officials are still observing the case. They cannot tell the exact cause of this bizarre massive death. The fish case occured near Beebe, where the government are still investigating the dead birds mystery.
John Fitzpatrick, the director of Cornell University’s ornithology lab in Ithaca suggested that the violent weather might cause the death of thousands of drum fish in Arkansas. He said, “Bad weather can occasionally catch flocks off guard, blow them off a roost, and they get hurled up suddenly into this thundercloud.”
Mostly, the drum fish were found in the Arkansas River, near Ozark, as reported by The New York Daily News. It is pretty strange because there is only one species that is affected. It means contaminated water is not the one which kills the fish. That fact makes the officials work harder to find the cause.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, represented by Keith Stephens told that the cause could be a disease, because there is only one species which was affected. He didn’t believe that the environmental problem might cause the death.
It was on Thursday that the dead drum fish were firstly found. Some fish experts were then doing tests to find out how the fish died. For your information, a mass death of aquatic life has ever happened in Arkansas prior to this drum fish case. In the last five years, there were many fish killed. “It is common”, said Keith Stephen.
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