Animals Just Can’t Stay Alive Anymore

It started with thousands of red-winged blackbirds and starlings falling from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas on New Years Day, which admittedly was incredibly creepy. Then, a few days later, 500 more red-winged blackbirds and startlings fell across a highway in Lousiana, which was doubly creepy. Now, a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated reports of dead animals from around the world seem to ask the question…have animals just stopped bothering to stay alive?

The newest reports include not just bird deaths (50 more birds were found dead in Sweden), but dead fish, too. Two million dead fish have popped up in The Chesapeake Bay, according to the Baltimore Sun, while hundreds of dead fish have washed up in New Zealand and a 100 tons of fish washed up on the shores of a Brazilian fishing village since last Thursday.

While none of these of these have been explained, there are different theories for each. The Arkansas birds apparently died from internal injuries, and some are blaming New Years fireworks for the kills. The Louisiana bird deaths also suffered from internal injuries and possible causes have been given as hail, lightning or fireworks. In Sweden, veterinarians are blaming cold weather, lack of food or more fireworks. (Who is selling fireworks to all these birds?)

The Chesapeake Bay fish kills are being blamed on “cold water stress,” as the type of fish, the spot, are susceptible to cold water and sudden cold may have killed them before they could swim to warmer water. The New Zealand deaths are being blamed on starvation due to bad weather conditions (which would explain why most of the fish were missing their eyes.) As for the tons of Brazilian dead fish, the regional coordinator of civil preparedness of the area, Captain Edson Oliveira Avila, is blaming the deaths on one of three possible things: an environmental imbalance, fishing boats dumping dead fish or a chemical leak.

But since it’s unsatisfying to think of all of these as explainable coincidences, who can we turn to for one big explanation for all the deaths? Well, don’t ask Kirk Cameron. Anderson Cooper tried that and he wasn’t any help at all… almost as if he had no connection at all to the bird deaths. Weird.

[CNN, Huffington Post]

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