Piles of washed-up shellfish along Fingal’s coast prompt idea of mollusc paramedics

Doug Finnegan walked out of the water in a swimsuit and sea shoes to protect his feet from the stings of weever fish.

He has swum in the sea every day at 6am for decades, he says. Although not always here, at Portmarnock Beach, and today he had come for the afternoon because it was a Sunday, he says.

He definitely spotted the piles of razor clams and other shellfish that washed up here and all along the coast in mid-November, says Finnegan. Most of them looked dead. 

They were everywhere, he says. It was a sight.

Labour Party Councillor Brian McDonagh noticed it too, taking videos of of Portmarnock beach that show the dead sea life blanketing the shore as far as the lens could see, and constituents sent him messages and pictures too.

He’s seen shellfish washed up before, he says. “But this was on a different scale.” 

“There were tens of thousands of live, dead and dying shellfish, of lots of different types,” he said. “There were crabs.” 

McDonagh shared a photo a friend sent him of a dead seal washed up on the shore.

Locals asked him about it too, he says – wondering what was behind it and, in particular, whether dredging and razor clam fishing was responsible for the scale of the drift.

Karin Dubsky, an environmental scientist and director of Coastwatch Ireland, said it is more likely that aggressive winds brought by Storm Claudia were to blame. Climate change makes those conditions more frequent, she says. 

“It was virtually sure to be the storm because of the pattern of how it happened," said Dubsky.

What she would like to see, she says, is the council to work with Coastwatch Ireland to set up a volunteer response to such events, which are set to become more frequent.

Trained locals could go down and identify those shellfish which are intact and alive and return them, at least, to the sea, she says. “And you would hope that at least some of them would survive.”

At the area committee

At a meeting of the council’s Howth/Mahahide Area Committee on 3 December, McDonagh asked if officials would investigate what had caused the mass death. 

He got one line back, from Hans Visser, the biodiversity officer: “It is difficult to ascertain whether the storm or the shellfish dredging or both cause the wash up of dead sealife.” 

It’s not in the council’s remit to study this, said Gemma Carr, a senior executive parks and landscape officer at the council, at the meeting. 

She would think it would be under the Marine Institute, she said. 

But Dubsky said, really it’s not in their remit either. “We didn't report it to the Marine Institute because we knew they're going to do nothing about it,” she said.

The Marine Institute is a state agency that says its remit is to provide “scientific and technical advice to the government to inform policy and support the sustainable development of Ireland's marine resources”.

McDonagh, the Labour councillor, said that it wasn’t the first time there’s been such a big wash-up of dead sea creatures on Fingal’s shore.

He recalled an earlier case, about a decade back, that was down to the water suddenly becoming really cold, he said. “We got a much bigger scale of fish life that died all the way across the coast.”

He wasn’t convinced that it was primarily the dredging, he says, because the clams were in the shells. 

But it does raise concerns about the intensification of dredging for clams in the area, he said, and the impact of that. 

Joan Hopkins, a Social Democrats councillor, said she had asked her party colleague, Jennifer Whitmore TD, to ask about whether all the fishing was legal. 

They said they had to contact the Sea Fisheries Protection Authority (SFPA), which she did – but she hasn’t heard anything back. 

A spokesperson for the Marine Institute said that its Fish Health Unit hasn’t received any reports of dead fish or other marine life washing up on Portmarnock or Gormanston beaches. 

The Fish Health Unit would carry out a formal investigation if there was suspicion of an aquatic disease, they said. “Sudden mass mortality events like this are generally related to environmental events.”

At the meeting, councillors agreed to write to the SFPA together, to ask questions around dredging regulations.

Signs of storms

At the meeting, Green Party Councillor David Healy said one indication that it was the stormy weather in this instance, not the dredging to blame, was that it was all along the coast that was affected. 

Dubsky, of Coastwatch Ireland, expanded on that.

Within a day of Storm Claudia, the NGO had started to get reports from Balbriggan of sea life washing up, which was three inches thick.

And, the same up the coast, at Portrane, and upwards into Louth, she said. 

“What we think is happening is that the weather patterns are changing,” she said. 

An onshore wind doesn’t have to be that strong, but it can be prolonged, she said, and the waves break on the sand. Those waves churn up the bottom sediment where all these animals live. 

“And as those are pushed, you know, into the water column, the next wave pushes them on a little bit more towards shore,” she says. “And if you have this prolonged wind for two or three days, then you can have this mass death.” 

She would love to see a motion calling on the council to set up a response to that with volunteers, she said.

They could put the sea life into buckets, or aquaria, wait for the weather to calm down, and put them back into the sea when the time is right. 

"We have done it on a small scale, on a pilot scale, in Ballymoney in North Wexford, where you just ask as many people as possible to come with big buckets,” she said.

She would like to see a meeting with council biodiversity officers to explore options, she says. “Different areas need different responses.”

She said there’s certain special shellfish on Dublin’s coast – like a mollusk found on the coast  here – Arctica islandica. They can live for hundreds of years.

“We are lucky to have it. But I could really see that, within my lifetime, it could … it could be gone, even from storm frequency,” she said. 

It’s a species like that, that volunteers should intervene to try to rescue, she said. “Let's try and selectively get those which are very threatened by storms like that.”

“If you have really high-value [in terms of biodiversity] shellfish washed up, which could survive, and people are just sad and walk all over them, then, you know, we have done nothing,” she said.  “But at least we should try to do something.”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Fund.