Exposed by low tide and bereft of a cooling breeze, the mollusks overheated to the point of cooking.
Context is everything when it comes to cooked mussels. In a bowl, served in a white wine-garlic sauce with a crusty baguette for dipping, they’re a good thing. On a beach, however, still adhered to rocks, is not where you want to encounter cooked mussels.
This is precisely what marine researcher Jackie Sones saw in mid-June when visiting Bodega Bay in northern California – “scores of dead mussels on the rocks, their shells gaping and scorched, their meats thoroughly cooked.” The unfortunate mollusks had succumbed to temperatures that were unusually hot for that time of year.
On June 11, it was 75F/24C outside, and the breeze that usually sweeps in off the sea ceased as well. Marine ecologist Brian Helmuth is cited in Bay Nature:
What made this situation so unusual is that the heatwave occurred early in the summer season, when tides shift in the late morning and early afternoon. This exposes the mussels to more direct sunlight than they’d normally have later in the year, when tides shift in the early morning or late at night, reducing the danger for tide pool dwellers.
As Eric Simons writes in Bay Nature,
It’s an alarming reminder of how present climate change already is; it’s no longer a nebulous prediction for the future. In Simons’ words, it’s also indicative of the fragility of so many marine creatures, and how “a lot of ecosystems exist really close to the edge of what they can tolerate.”
