Frozen sharks wash up on the shores of the US West Coast
Icy temperatures in the north and northeast of the USA of up to minus 40 degrees Celsius around the turn of the year not only make life difficult for people, marine creatures also suffer. Now, several frozen sharks have washed ashore in the state of Massachusetts.
As the shark conservation organisation Atlantic White Shark Conservancy reported on their social media pages, it is currently too cold for sharks in the sea. Some of them had suffered cold shocks and therefore washed up on the beaches, where they were found completely frozen. The animal rights activists recovered the sharks, then dissected them, so as to examine their corpses in detail.
Frigid temperatures may have transformed the waters off Cape Cod to ice, but it turns out the recent cold snap is not literally just freezing sharks to death as the examinations of the sharks showed. Water temperature may play a role at some point in the animal’s death, but the scientist stressed the real factor would be that the shark is stranded and, therefore, incapable of breathing which is the primary cause of the death of the sharks.
On their Facebook page www.facebook.com/atlanticwhiteshark, the animal rights activists have posted photos of the frozen sharks. In them, dead thresher sharks and employees of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, who recovered and dissected the animals, can be seen.
Herbert
10th January 2018
