With the heat there is a serious death of fish in the Orbetello lagoon.And it's not the first

Local authorities are trying to repair the damage caused by the death of fish in the Orbetello lagoon, in Tuscany, at the height of the tourist season.

• After that of 2015, the Orbetello lagoon (in Tuscany) is once again struggling with a serious fish kill.
• The algae, which proliferated due to fertilizers, died en masse due to the increase in temperatures, depriving the water of oxygen.
• Local authorities are trying to contain the emergency which also worries tourist operators.

Impossible to count them:There are thousands and thousands of sea bream, sea bass and eels found dead in these days at the end of July in the Orbetello lagoon, in the Grosseto Maremma, in Tuscany.A fish kill which is reminiscent of the one that already occurred in the same area in 2015 but, according to the fishermen in the area, it could be even more impressive.With serious ecological and economic consequences.

The causes of the fish deaths in the Orbetello lagoon

But what could have caused a death of fish of this caliber?At the moment the evaluations are still ongoing but there is no doubt that, with the intense ones heat waves which characterized the second half of July, also there water temperature has increased.All this in an area that, biologist Mauro Lenzi explains to 3BMeteo, is already characterized byeutrophication, that is, by the presence of enormous quantities of fertilizers which accelerate the growth of algal vegetation.Bad algae they are ephemeral and, when the water temperature is this high, they die en masse.This is how things are triggered toxic fermentations which make the environment increasingly less healthy and consume oxygen (in jargon we speak of anoxia).It is a phenomenon that occurs especially where the water is stagnant.

Finding themselves in this environment unsuitable for life, fish die by the thousands and their smelly carcasses rise to the surface, with all the inconveniences that this entails. The post reports that so far more than one have been removed 24 thousand kilos, especially among those who had been blocked by the cleaner, a sort of filter that prevents them from reaching the sea.It is much more cumbersome to recover all the others that have ended up on the shore, on the edges of the canal or that have remained on the surface without draining away.

The difficult management of the fish deaths in Orbetello

All this happens in the middle of bathing season, a few hundred meters from usually very busy beaches.The plant managers they fear a stampede of tourists, both for the strong whiffs of smell of rotten fish, both for the health risks.The Association for the defense of Ansedonia, via a note, complains in fact how the pumping of clean sea water to the west of the lagoon has inevitably conveyed the putrid water towards the coast of Feniglia.The ditch of the Etruscan Tagliata, in front of the canal, had already been the subject of numerous bathing bans because it was heavily polluted.The mayor of Orbetello, Andrea Casamenti, he asked to the president of the Tuscany region Eugenio Giani to declare a state of emergency.This would release funds for crisis containment operations which, to date, the municipality is taking on.

Asked by Nova Radio, Angelo Gentili, member of the national secretariat of Legambiente, urges us to start from contingency to think from a broader perspective.“We need to clean the canals, re-establish greater contact with the sea water, ensure that there is greater movement of the water, both through the pumps and through blades that move it.The lagoon is a very fragile system that tends to fill up:we need to remove the sediments that accumulate,” he explains.“There would be many interventions, but they should be done throughout the year, not just during the emergency period.It is necessary that the Tuscany region and the Ministry of the Environment take the lagoon as one of the national centers of wetlands to be protected, also because there are productive activities such as fishing inside.All interventions must be carried out before the irreparable happens, because the damage is more extensive than what would be spent with correct, long-lasting and continuous maintenance."

Previous:from the mussels of Taranto to the fish of Palau

TO Orbetello the memory of the imposing is still alive fish kill occurred in 2015:at the time two thousand quintals of carcasses were collected.But this is not just a Maremma problem.Precisely in these days, always the overheating of the waters killed by asphyxiation the mussels of Taranto which were still at sea, waiting to be collected for sale.According to trade associations, some cooperatives risk losing 70-80 percent of their production.Even on the beaches ofupper Adriatic tons of them were found dead the infamous blue crabs, for reasons yet to be ascertained.

With the Mediterranean Sea which becomes hot, it is inevitable that such incidents will happen, on a large or small scale.In 2022, the year of record heat and drought that plagued the Bel Paese for months, the beach of La Sciumara in Palau, in Sardinia, was covered from a silver carpet with a nauseating smell:they were sea bass, sea bream, white bream and sole that had been trapped in the Riu Surrau when the outlet to the sea closed and they died there from hypoxia.Again due to the drought of summer 2022, the little ones waterways of South Tyrol they remained dry condemning the fish fauna to death.