Hundreds of fish wash up on Cape Cod beach
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Hundreds of fish washed up on a Cape Cod beach Tuesday morning.
A beachgoer captured a video of the fish, both dead and alive, on Nauset Beach, which stretches for 10 miles between Orleans and Chatham, and posted it to Instagram. The striking sight left many questioning why the fish had died, or what led such a large number to wash up on the sand.
“It’s an unusual behavior for people to see, but it’s not actually all that uncommon,” Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, told Boston.com.
LaCasse said the fish in the video are a type of herring known as Atlantic menhaden, which flock to the Cape in large schools each summer. The likely reason so many were seen washing up on shore at Nauset Beach Tuesday was to avoid predators like stripe bass and bluefish, who follow them each year as they move up the East Coast, he said.
Packs of bluefish pursue the herring, pushing the school closer to the shore where it’s easier to trap them. Then, they’ll attack the fish, hoping to wound them and make them easier to catch, LaCasse said. In response, the herring will jump from the water in an attempt to evade their predators. While scientists can’t say for certain that’s what happened Tuesday at Nauset Beach, LaCasse said it’s by far the most likely explanation.
“Some people will think, ‘Oh, that’s suicidal,” LaCasse said. “But it actually isn’t a bad strategy. That might’ve been a better alternative: To get out of the water and to hop back into the water, or have the next wave bring them back into the water.”
But these fish met a receding tide rather than a high tide, and had no way to make it back from the beach to the ocean. That, LaCasse said, likely explains why some fish on the sand are still alive in the video.
“This is, quite literally, the lion chasing the person to cliff edge, and someone deciding they might have better odds jumping,” he said.
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