NEW BEDFORD — Buzzards Bay-area environmental groups have teamed up to create an iPhone application that will facilitate reporting of fish kills and help to determine what is killing hundreds of bluefish, striped bass and menhaden.
Joe Famely, an environmental scientist for the Woods Hole Group, said the app, called mCrowd, was inspired by his discovery of a group of 1,000 dead fish in 2009.
“We originally thought it might be because of low oxygen levels, but the data didn’t support that,” Famely said of the fish kill found two miles southwest of Falmouth’s Cleveland Ledge. “That got us thinking about what’s going on in the bay.”
In the summers that followed, the Woods Hole Group received several reports of groups of 25 to 50 fish washing ashore on Falmouth beaches. Some of the fish had lesions or tumors on their skin; others had no visible signs of illness.
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