Fish falling from the sky? The happenings might seem bizarre, or even biblical, but scientists say they have a perfectly rational explanation.
The couple had just put their 4-year-old daughter to bed, and Gerhard, a 38-year-old artist, was alarmed. Suddenly, shiny and silver things, each just a few inches long, began flying past the window.“We went outside, and there were just fish everywhere, about 20 to 30 fish,” Gerhard said. “I was like, ‘OK, we’ve had a pandemic and fires and now, fish are falling from the sky.’”
Those that washed ashore were likely chased by marine predators into the shallow lagoon waters, where they soon got stuck and ran out of oxygen, said Jarrod Santora, a marine ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Anchovies are a boom-and-bust species: Their populations naturally shrink and expand, and scientists don’t know exactly why. But since a marine heat wave that ended around 2016, the population of anchovies off the California coast has exploded “by orders of magnitude,” Santora said. It has created a banquet for the birds, sea lions and whales that feast on them, he added.
The mass anchovy die-off in Bolinas Lagoon was rare, but not unprecedented. In 2013, anchovies crowded into Santa Cruz harbor, depriving themselves of oxygen. The next year, a mass die-off of the tiny fish fouled an Oregon beach town. Earlier this year, thousands of the fish also washed up dead on a beach in Chile.
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