Netherlands over 20,000 guillemot Birds Wash up Dead on Dutch Coast

A shocking report of a mass seabird death reported from the Netherlands.

Scientists are scrambling to understand the sudden death of an estimated 20,000 guillemots off the Dutch coast, hundreds of which are washing up on the country’s shoreline. The bodies of the birds, which spend most of their lives at sea where they dive for their food, started emerging over the past month, from the Wadden Islands in the north to Zeeland in the south

“The working hypothesis is that it is a combination of bad weather plus something else, and we are trying to find the smoking gun,” Leopold said. “We have dissected some of the birds. They are clean but they were very skinny, with gut problems, which is indicative of starvation. But we need a larger sample and so have been asking people to collect birds for us.”

Another possible cause may be due to a number of shipping containers (291) that were lost at sea on the 2nd of January in seas north of Amsterdam.

But in essence, nobody really has a clue at the moment.

I think it's quite easy to jump to conclusions as to what the real reason behind such a tragic event may be, but hopefully time might reveal the answer but then again, it may not.

Source

A few images can be seen on this Dutchmans Twitter link.

Link

Possibly related to magnetic field.

Poisoning. That's got to be the reason. Hope they do test on them.

Sounds like they were exposed to some sort of toxin. I wonder where the toxin came from, did someone dump something into the ocean that floated to the top, like some sort of ketone? It could be almost anything, is where they were found close to a river where a toxic substance was dumped into a sewer. Remember, something can cause the birds to not be able to keep warm and there would not be any problem with that chemistry being present during the summer. I doubt if it is from bacteria, the water up there is too cold to support the bacteria this time of year.

a reply to: rickymouse

did someone dump something into the ocean that floated to the top, like some sort of ketone?

They said the bodies were clean.

a reply to: studio500

Thats odd, there was a large number of dead fish wash up on the south west coast of Western Australian in recent days.

Might be starvation?

Well, we've mostly been in denial about our ill planet since I was a kid...

and I'm friggan old now.

Bad weather in the North Sea. Who would have thought it?

Mass bird deaths like this can only be attributed to (1) pollution and / or (2) over-fishing leading to starvation.

Given that the EU's Common Fisheries Policy frequently leads to habitat crash due to overfishing, I would start pointing my finger at that. Throw in the coincidence that 350 containers fell off a bulk carrier earlier in the month and we have the added problem of some sort of pollution.

originally posted by: SeaWorthy
a reply to: rickymouse

did someone dump something into the ocean that floated to the top, like some sort of ketone?

They said the bodies were clean.

a simple solvent could cause the birds to get hypothermia. It could melt their skins fat layer. Even soap could do that, soaps are often sulfur compounds, phosphates are another example of soap creating chemistry.

The Nenderlands are the ancestral homeland of the first Nenderthals and also the home of the first major city to recreationally legalize marijuana, Amsterdam, which started as a dam at the river Amster built by Nenderthals so that their marijuana crops wouldn't be flooded. They went on to colonize most of the European continent until more recent migrations of black homo sapiens from Africa interbred with them to create caucasian mankind.