Authorities in Japan aren't sure why more than a thousand tons of dead fish have washed ashore in recent days—but they don't recommend eating them. Last week, around 1,200 tons of sardines and mackerels washed up on a beach in Hokkaido, leaving what the AP describes as a "silver blanket" more than half a mile long. On Wednesday, hundreds of miles to the south at the fishing port of Nikiri in Honshu, around 40 tons of dead Japanese scaled sardines, known as sappa, started washing up, the Guardian reports. Schools of the fish had been spotted at the port days earlier.
A fisherman who has been operating in Nakiri for 25 years told the Mainichi Shimbun that he'd never seen anything like it before. "It was only around last year that we began to catch sappa in Nakiri," he said. "It makes me feel the marine ecosystem is changing." Officials in Nikiri say the cause of the die-off is unknown, though one theory is that Japanese amberjack or other predatory fish chased the fish into the port, where they ran out of oxygen in the confined space. Sudden drops in water temperature during migration are also a major cause of fish die-offs, authorities say.
But while the cause hasn't been confirmed, officials are pushing back against suggestions that there is a link to the release of radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in August. Authorities say the water has been extensively treated. "There have been no abnormalities found in the results of water-monitoring surveys," Japan's fisheries agency said of water pumped out of the tsunami-ruined plant, per the Guardian. "We're concerned about the proliferation of information that's not based on scientific evidence."
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