Victoria River Turns Bright Green as Nature Runs Amok

Along with all the fish and bird kills in the news we have this:

VICTORIA — Horrified nature-lovers at Goldstream Provincial Park watched as the Goldstream River turned bright green late Wednesday afternoon.

The fluorescent green colouring appeared to start about 500 metres on the Victoria side of the entrance to the park and, over the course of an hour, the substance flowed down into the environmentally sensitive estuary.

By 5:30 p.m. the river, known for its dramatic salmon runs, eagles and other wildlife, was back to its normal colour.

Ministry of Environment teams were immediately sent to the area to investigate and members of Langford Fire Department collected samples for analysis.

No dead fish or animals had been found by early evening.

Earlier in the day a fountain beside Veterans Memorial Parkway in Langford also turned bright green, said Langford Fire Chief Bob Beckett.

Up to two million fish are thought to have died in a massive fish kill in the Chesapeake Bay and in thousands of fish have been killed off in Florida’s Spruce Creek.

500 Blackbirds have been found dead in Louisiana just after nearly 5000 blackbirds and 100,000 fish died mysteriously in Arkansas.

End of days?

4 thoughts on “Victoria River Turns Bright Green as Nature Runs Amok

  1. Kind of looks like Gatorade… ew.

    I have absolutely no explanation for the river turning green, but I have a theory on the blackbirds…

    Before I met my husband, I used to leave my windows open at night during the summer. I lived fairly close to some factories, which would “clean” out their smoke stacks in the middle of the night, which meant that they’d blow all the crap out that had built up during regular use (it was considered “safe” to do so at night, and the idea was that it wouldn’t effect people with asthma). When I woke up in the morning, that crap would be all over my window sill and covering my floors in about a 3′ circumference around the windows.

    It’s fairly easy to find stuff that is toxic to birds (even cooking on non-stick cookware is toxic to birds) and if an energy plant is burning stuff like this, it could kill them.

    If I’m right about this, it wouldn’t change my opinion that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, though. And I still have no explanation on the river… is there a Gatorade plant nearby? That’s all I can think of when I look at the picture. That’s freakish.

  2. Rob Taylor,

    I wouldn’t say this is a sign of the apocalypse, but it is definitively a bad sign.

  3. Might just be flourescent septic marker dye or emergency sea marker dye, and a prankster… just saying.

  4. One hundred and fifty one years ago, two English naturalists would have viewed the dropping of birds, and the washing up of dead fish and crabs, as nature’s spectacular staging of natural selection. One noted, “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.”….. In October 1838, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.”.

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