Things To Come?

The article below is really just foreshadowing of things to come. The mass carnage of the tribulation period will include loss of every kind of life on the planet, including the sea. Even as early as the seal judgments, the world will witness the loss of one-third of the sea life. 

The findings in the article below are most definitely concerning:

Mass Die-Off Of West Coast Sealife: Fukushima Radiation...Or Something Else?

[This is a relatively long article but quite interesting. It is unclear exactly what is causing these deaths, but the loss in sea life seems real. This is worth watching for further developments]

NBC Nightly News reports that a mass die-off of starfish up and down the West Coast of North America is puzzling scientists

It’s not just sea stars.

There have been widespread reports of mysterious injury to Alaskan seals.

The Alaska Dispatch reports:

Scores of dead and sick ringed seals — some with open wounds, unusual hair loss and internal ulcers — … began washing up in summer 2011 in Western Alaska.

Even today, a few seals continue to trickle ashore, biologists said. But the cause of the illness remains a mystery, despite an international effort to identify it. Some people believe radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan in March 2011 is a factor. That’s never been proven. It hasn’t been disqualified, either.

A lack of radiation sampling in remote regions after the explosion means no one knows how much airborne radiation fell into the Bering Sea ice, or whether seals were in the vicinity of any fallout, said Doug Dasher, a researcher with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

If the seals did ingest radiation, much of it would have been excreted out of the body before the testing of the carcasses that occurred several months after the incident, he said. Such testing found radiation levels similar to those found in the mid 1990s.

St. Lawrence Island is “way too far north for the marine transport to occur right now,” Dasher said.

Still, for a community that harvests animals from the Bering Sea, its hard not to think about Fukushima, said Pungowiyi. He said he was getting ready to go seal hunting: Winds blowing in from the north have made for prime seal-hunting conditions.

“It’s always on the backs of our minds,” he said of the radiation.

More than a year ago, 15 out of 15 bluefin tuna tested in California waters were contaminated with radioactive cesium from Fukushima.

Bluefin tuna are a wide-ranging fish, which can swim back and forth between Japan and North America in a year:

But what about other types of fish?

Sockeye salmon also have a range spanning all of the way from Japan to Alaska, Canada, Washington and Oregon:

Associated Press reports that both scientists and native elders in British Columbia say that sockeye numbers have plummeted:

Sockeye salmon returns plunge to historic lows.

***

Last month, [the Department of Fisheries and Oceans] noted returns for the Skeena River sockeye run were dire.

[Mel Kotyk, North Coast area director for the Department] said department scientists don’t know why the return numbers are so low…. “When they went out to sea they seemed to be very strong and healthy and in good numbers, so we think something happened in the ocean.”

***

“We’ve never seen anything like this in all these years I’ve done this. I’ve asked the elders and they have never seen anything like this at all.” [said Chief Wilf Adam]

Another example – pacific herring – is even more dramatic.   Pacific herring is wide-ranging fish, spanning all the way from Japan to Southern California:

The Globe and Mail, Aug 13, 2013 (Emphasis Added): Independent fisheries scientistAlexandra Morton is raising concerns about a disease she says is spreading through Pacific herring causing fish to hemorrhage. [...] “Two days ago I did a beach seine on Malcolm Island [near Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island] and I got approximately 100 of these little herring and they were not only bleeding from their fins, but their bellies, their chins, their eyeballs.  [...] “It was 100 per cent … I couldn’t find any that weren’t bleeding to some degree. And they wereschooling with young sockeye [salmon]”

Sun News, Aug 12, 2013: [Morton] dragged up several hundred of the fish this past weekend and found the apparent infection had spread – instead of their usual silver colour the fish had eyes, tails, underbellies, gills and faces plastered with the sickly red colour. “I have never seen fish that looked this bad,” [...] In June, the affected fish were only found in eastern Johnstone Strait, but have since spread to Alert Bay and Sointula, she said.

There have been many other reports of mysterious sickness among West Coast North American sealife … such as dead and dying sea lions.  Sea lions’ main food is herring:

Sea lions will eat a lot of different prey items: octopus, squid, small sharks. But their bread and butter is herring ….

And the Newcastle Herald carried a report in October from a sailor saying that “the ocean is broken”:

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

“After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead,” [Newcastle, Australia yachtsman Ivan] Macfadyen said.

“We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

“I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen.”

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes. [There is a huge quantity of debris from Japan heading across the ocean towards the West Coast. But it is unclear whether the sailor is referring to this or something else. After all, there is a lot of man-made garbage floating around the Pacific.]

In any event, this post does not argue that the injury to sealife is due to Fukushima … we honestly don’t know the cause or causes of the unusual behavior in ocean life, and are only certain of one thing:  the U.S. and Canadian governments should fund extensive testing to figure out what’s really going on, and then publicly release the results.

* EneNews was the main source of information for this essay. For example, here’s a one-sentence round-up of ocean weirdness from EneNews:

There have been several similar reports about wildlife around the Pacific, includingsardines, seals, sea lions, polar bears, sea stars, turtles, salmon, herring, coral and more.