Us: Google is now hosting a map of incidents of mass animal deaths around the world. Google Maps’ distinctive blue balloons indicate where the deaths took place. One can click on a balloon and get a link to a news report on the incident.
As of January 7 (Friday afternoon), there were about 30 cases pinpointed on the search engine’s mapping site, most of them in the US and Europe.
In the case of the Arkansas blackbirds, wildlife buffs have said that a loud noise or other event may have precipitated the blunt-force trauma that killed the birds. Of all the notions about their deaths, Susie Kesielke, curator of birds at the Los Angeles Zoo, believes the theory that fireworks startled the birds is the most plausible.
Jonathan Sleeman, Director, National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, said his office has investigated 16 mass bird deaths in the past 20 years. “This is a bit unusual but not unique,” he explained. “Most of the cases involved pesticides or poison ingested by the birds, but trauma has also been found to be the cause of mass bird deaths.”
According to a blog, Universe Today, the deaths are not so much strange as they are a symptom of the digital age where news travels faster than you can say, ‘The End is Nigh.’ It cited a Time magazine article that details several strange mass animal deaths and wonders “if the internet age allows us to connect the dots where there are none to be connected.”
As for connecting dots, the blog suggests that the map on Google could be laid on top of a “current global oil exploration map to test the hypothesis that the deaths could have been caused by ground-penetrating tomography.”
Source: CNN
