The Red River in China doesn't get much if any coverage here in the United States of America
Yet it is just one more "Wow, is this some kind of overlooked Omen?"
Revelation 16:3 "And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea".
Now clearly the entire sea is not covered in this blood red water, and clearly millions of fish are not washing up onto the beach, but this is the very early stage of something significant. Also there has been a major increase of fish washing up on shore, and lets not forget that the Ocean directly effect lakes as well, many are connected:
Fish pose a threat to travelers’ sense of smell, but not their health, park officials say
Thousands of dead carp are washing up along the shores of Lake Mohave.
Marine life is disappearing from Puget Sound, and fast
(Editor's Note: This story has been altered. Tracy Collier is director of the environmental conservation division of the National Marine Fisheries Service's Northwest Fisheries Science Center. The original version of this story misstated his title.)
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Peter Lang and his buddies like to go diving by Blake Island, just across Puget Sound from West Seattle, where they can scoop up delectable Dungeness crabs.
But when they showed up last spring, the lush meadows of eelgrass where crab like to hide were nearly gone. In the sandy expanse below, they could pick out just a cell phone and an old car radio.
Where they normally spotted scads of crabs and fish, they saw just one sick-looking Dungeness -- with only one claw. It didn't bother to run from them.
The place -- within sight of Tillicum Village, where tourists savor salmon and celebrate the Sound's bounty -- had turned into an underwater desert.
In three other places where Lang and his friends expected to chase after bountiful sea life, they instead found a barren expanse.
"The shallows of Puget Sound are mostly dead," asserts Lang, who has been diving here since 1988. "Something's drastically changed in the last two years."
Lang's story and similar anecdotes match the findings of scientists who study the Sound. Their conclusion: Marine life is disappearing, and fast.
Seabird populations are plummeting. The state's largest seabird-nesting colony last year saw a catastrophic failure. In the south Sound -- years after fishing was cut way back for Pacific cod, whiting and walleye pollock -- populations are still in critical condition.
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 | Paul Joseph Brown / P-I | |
| A dead lingcod pulled out of Hood Canal in September reflects a haunting conclusion by those who know Puget Sound: "Dead zones" are spreading. | ||
Salmon stocks stand at perhaps 10 percent of their historic abundance, and individual fish are much smaller.
The orcas that eat those salmon are the highest predator trying to eke out a living in Puget Sound. The federal government last year awarded local orcas the strongest protection available for species slipping toward extinction. Later this year, federal scientists will announce which areas of the Sound must be preserved to keep the population afloat. Whale lovers wonder if the effort will be enough.
The orcas are victims of decades of politicians' broken promises, industries' resistance to stricter regulations and -- perhaps most damagingly -- the inability to convince residents to live and work more gently on the shores of the Sound. It all has resulted in a failure to turn the environmental tide in favor of the salmon on which the orcas depend -- much less launch the broad-based rescue of Washington's unique inland sea that scientists say is necessary to prevent the loss of species.
Warnings are dire.
Recent studies show that Puget Sound's herring -- a key link in the food chain -- contain higher contamination levels than those in Europe's highly polluted Baltic Sea. In May, leading federal and state scientists reported that the "food web of Puget Sound appears to be more seriously contaminated than previously anticipated."
And orcas now are among the more chemically contaminated marine mammals in the world's oceans.
What's causing the disappearance of the eelgrass and crabs, the birds and fish? Hard to say.
From The New York Times
Marine Life Disappearing Off California
Published: March 5, 1995
WASHINGTON, March 4— Warming seas have wiped out most of a critical link in the ocean food chain in the waters off Southern California, creating a vast wasteland with few fish and few birds, researchers have reported.
In a study published on Friday in the journal Science, Dr. John McGowan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego reported that the water temperature off San Diego had risen two to three degrees Fahrenheit since 1951 and that the population of zooplankton, a critical part of the food chain, had declined by 80 percent.
Zooplankton comprises the tiny ocean creatures that are the primary food for hundreds of fish and bird species. Without them, once-teeming waters become almost void of life, Dr. McGowan said, adding, "It already is pretty dead out there."
Dr. McGowan recalled an abundance of fish and bird life on scientific cruises in the 1960's and said that on a recent cruise he "was flabbergasted at the difference."
Dr. McGowan and Dr. Dean Roemmich, another Scripps scientist, reported on the results of hundreds of thousands of water, temperature and plankton samples taken during 222 scientific cruises over the last 42 years.
The cruises covered the same sampling sites within a 50,000-square-mile area off San Diego and Point Conception, Calif. During the period, Dr. McGowan said, there had been an increase in the temperature in the top 600 feet of water and a decline in the zooplankton.
"Zooplankton is the main diet for many species of fish, including sardines, anchovy, hake, jack mackerel and Pacific mackerel," Dr. McGowan said. "This could have a very strong effect" on fish survival.
The rise in temperature, he said, was robbing surface waters of nutrients like nitrates and phosphates that the plant plankton needs to survive. Because the zooplankton feeds on the plant plankton, the loss of nutrients ripples up the food chain.
Dr. McGowan said there was no way to determine whether the warming resulted from natural changes or the greenhouse effect, in which heat from the Sun is trapped by various atmospheric pollutants like carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and nitrous oxide from motor vehicles.
Commercial anchovy fishing in the area has already crashed, Dr. McGowan said, and the commercial fish harvest for other species has declined by about 40 percent since the 1970's.
Dr. Dick Veit, a zoologist at the University of Washington, said the findings were consistent with other studies that had shown stunning losses of fish and sea bird populations along the Pacific Coast.
Dr. Veit said that he had found a decline of 90 percent in the numbers of one group of sea birds and that other researchers had reported similar disappearances of sea life along the West Coast.
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