More than 100 Amazon river dolphins have died in the sweltering waters of Brazil’s Lake Tefé, which recently hit 102 degrees.
Roughly 120 dolphins have perished in a tributary of the Amazon River over the past week, a mass death that experts think may be linked to an extreme drought and heat that is plaguing the region.
The mass death of these rare river dolphins has underscored concerns about the effects of human-driven climate change, which is exacerbating all types of extreme weather events across the world. Scientists at the Mamirauá Institute, a local research center supported by the Brazilian government, said that more research would be needed to isolate the exact culprits behind the dolphin deaths, especially because an emerging El Niño weather pattern could be a factor.
“It’s still early to determine the cause of this extreme event but according to our experts, it is certainly connected to the drought period and high temperatures in Lake Tefé, in which some points are exceeding 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit),” the institute said in a statement to CNN.
The dieoff of the river dolphins occurred in Lake Tefé, a part of the upper Brazilian Amazon that has experienced sweltering temperatures that are about 10° Fahrenheit hotter than average for this time of year. Locals and researchers in the area have also reported that thousands of fish have died during the drought due to a scarcity of oxygen in the freshwater system.
About 80 percent of the deceased dolphins are “boto,” a species of pink dolphins, while the remainder belong to a gray species called “tucuxi.” These animals have adapted to the freshwater ecosystems of the Amazon, which confines them to a relatively limited habitat that renders them particularly vulnerable to extreme heat. However, mass die-offs of whales and other wide-ranging oceanic species are also occurring in many other regions of the world; many of those events may be linked to climate change.
The Tefé region is suffering due to an anomalous lack of rainfall in recent weeks, which have lowered the depths of some rivers and lakes by an astonishing three meters, or nine feet, compared to average levels at this time of year.
“The past month in Tefé has seemed like a science-fiction climate-change scenario,” Daniel Tregidgo, a British researcher in the area, told The Guardian. “Regular sightings of pink river dolphins are one of the great privileges of living in the heart of the Amazon. Pretty much every time I go to the market to have breakfast I see them come to the surface and it reminds me why I live here.
“To know that one has died is sad, but to see piles of carcasses, knowing that this drought has killed over 100, is a tragedy,” he added.
link: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvj5vv/the-amazon-is-getting-so-hot-that-dolphins-are-dying-en-masse
I just read an article today where scientists were saying that we had reached the 1.5 C limit since preindustrial levels that we had set during the Paris climate agreement. We hit that limit this year. We were supposed to hit it for another 10 years.
Basically these scientists were saying we were actually starting the boiling period. I don't find it hard to believe at all.
It's October and we have to run the AC during the night so we can sleep well without feeling too hot up here in Montreal Canada. It used to start getting really chilly around this time of year, but it's really hot right now. Temperatures reached 28C today.
We didn't have proper Winter here em São Paulo, Brazil. We had some sparse cold days and a lot of very hot ones. It was very bizarre. I don't even wanna know how the summer, which is beginning now, will be.
Actually, we just entered spring, on late September. And we did so in the midst of a heatwave that broke heat records for this year - we had days with 37C, which is high even for summer, and it won't be summer here until December.
Yes, I'm scared af as well. My family is sort of ignoring my warnings and actually planning to move to the coast (Santos), which is even hotter.
Some guys here in the comments said about migrating to the north, and that's something that has been on my mind as well as a long term plan, although I find it unlikely I can move to North America in the short term, so I'm thinking more realistically maybe southern Argentina?