An estimated 280 million fish were killed in inland waters in Louisiana following Hurricane Ida’s landfall. That’s according to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Inland Fisheries Fish Kill Coordinator Robby Maxwell, who says while the numbers are alarming it’s a regular occurrence with storms.
“It’s shocking to see in person, but we really expect following tropical storms, hurricanes, even summer rain storms we expect fish kills to happen in south Louisiana,” said Maxwell.
By comparison, an estimated 200 million were killed after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Maxwell says the inland waters of the fish kill from Ida spanned 1.8 million acres. And from a storm in size similar to Ida, with Laura in 2020, Maxwell says they saw an area of about 9 million acres of fish kill.
“But they were much scattered out and not as concentrated, because Laura was a much faster moving storm even though it was about the same intensity, Ida was a much slower moving storm, so we really see the fish kills concentrated in area where Ida was kind of stalling out and sitting,” said Maxwell.
Fish kills are a result of high winds and storm surges that create low-oxygen conditions. Maxwell says despite the large fish kill, southeast Louisiana still has plenty of fish and the state remains the Sportsman’s Paradise.
“The fish that survived obviously had something that made them resilient to these type of storms, so these are the fish that we want re-producing and creating more offspring for the future and they’ve been doing that here for thousands and thousands of years,” said Maxwell.
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