Mass Animal Die-Offs Are on the Rise, Killing Billions and Raising Questions
Huge animal die-offs, along with disease outbreaks and other population stressors, are happening more often.
We're not talking about a few dead fish littering your local beach. Mass die-offs are individual events that kill at least a billion animals, wipe out over 90 percent of a population, or destroy 700 million tons—the equivalent weight of roughly 1,900 Empire State Buildings—worth of animals.
And according to new research, such die-offs are on the rise.
The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to examine whether mass die-offs have increased over time.
Researchers reviewed historical records of 727 mass die-offs from 1940 to 2012 and found that over that time, these events have become more common for birds, marine invertebrates, and fish. The numbers remained unchanged for mammals and
