The heatwave in Canada last week cooked clams, mussels and clams in the open, in addition to killing an estimated 1 billion marine animals, according to researchers at the University of British Columbia. the region of the country hardest hit by extreme temperatures. .

Photos taken by Professor Christopher Harley, from the educational establishment’s zoology department, showed hundreds of boiled and rotting animals on the beach. Given the estimate of lethality per square meter, according to the academic, the prospect is that a large population of this ecosystem could not withstand the heat.

“I could smell this beach before arriving, because there were already a lot of dead animals from the day before, which was not the hottest among the three with the highest temperature”, detailed the professor in an interview with CNN.

“It was a disaster. There is a really large population of mussels covering the coast and most of these animals were dead,” added the professor, who also traveled to another beach in Vancouver, accompanied of his students.

According to a calculation done by him on behalf of the university, in the Salish Sea, which includes the straits of Georgia, Puget and Juan de Fuca, the estimate is that the death of one billion animals is “very preliminary”, but could be real.

The teacher explains that the palm of an adult man’s hand can contain between 50 and 100 mussels, and therefore thousands of them fit in a single square meter.

“There are 4,000 kilometers of coastline in the Salish Sea, so when you start to relate what we see locally to what we expect on a larger scale, based on what we know about where molds, you get some pretty big numbers pretty quickly.” , Harley said.

Recent damage could be even worse in 10 years, according to the expert. “If we continue to have heat waves like this, the ecosystem will be very, very different.”