Tuesday July 9, 2024
The Mercury News —
About 1,000 fish at Lake Elizabeth in Fremont’s Central Park have died this week after the excessive heat wave caused low oxygen levels in the water, according to a city spokesperson.
With city high temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s the first half of the week, the lake got hotter and oxygen levels dropped, suffocating close to 1,000 fish since Wednesday.
“Fish dying off in Lake Elizabeth in the summer is not completely unusual. We do get a small number of fish that die off every year,” city spokesperson Geneva Bosques said. But this year’s heat wave is doing unexpected numbers on the lake’s fish population.
The city sent a specialist with Livermore-headquartered Applied Marine Sciences to take test samples of the water to inspect oxygen levels and the possibility of an algae bloom, Bosques said. But she added there is no “visible indication” of a dangerous algae bloom, such as the one that killed off thousands of fish in Oakland’s Lake Merritt during a 2022 heat wave.
“It’s so hot and the water is so shallow, in the last couple of nights, the air hasn’t cooled off enough to lower the temperature at night,” Bosques said. “We haven’t gone in to do an in-depth analysis but we believe it’s gotten shallower over time.”