As harsh weather continues, hundreds of bait fish were seen washed ashore at South Durras. With many of them still alive, a question that arose was what caused the incident. The reasons behind the same still remained mysterious.

The event was something that was never seen before at the place. Hundreds of fishes were seen lying on shore. John Perkins, a Friends of Durras spokesman who snapped the pictures of the fishes, said that the waves came and washed them back.

It emerged that Durras Lake's entrance to the sea has been closed recently. Mr. Perkins said that it may be the reason behind unusual event. Stan Gorton, the Editor at Narooma News, said that he had never seen yellowtail scad and slimy mackerel piled up like that earlier.

The pictures of the fishes have been sent to NSW Fisheries to find out the reason behind the same. The residents of the Batemans Bay have been asked to stay away from the waterfront as the tides are still hitting the town.

"The tide wasn't as big as the same time last year. Climate scientists say this will be 'normal' high tide in couple of decades. It's a bit of a benchmark", said Narooma local Greg Watts.

Sarasota County - County workers are blaming a combination of factors for the deaths of thousands of fish in a pond off Clark Road this week. Heat, heavy rain, stormwater runoff and bird droppings depleted the oxygen level in Mirror Lake, near the southeast corner of Clark and Beneva roads, according to the county. Workers at nearby offices began to notice the dead fish Monday, but the majority turned up dead Tuesday, according to SNN Local News, Herald Tribune and World Chaos

About half of the ground-feeding songbirds collected from lead-mining regions of southeast Missouri had extremely high levels of lead in their blood, kidneys and liver, according to a survey released Tuesday by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Lead mining and smelting have been going on in portions of southeast Missouri since the early 1700s. The region contains the world's largest deposit of the lead mineral galena.

USGS performed the study at the request of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of an assessment of potential damage to wildlife from exposure to lead-contaminated soil. USGS scientists in 2009 and 2010 captured 34 songbirds in the region known as the Old Lead Belt, portions of the Big River flood plain and in an area within the Mark Twain National Forest.

"We knew mining had gone on there for many years," said Nelson Beyer, author of the study. "We knew the area itself was very contaminated but there hasn't been a lot of work done on songbirds."

Tested birds - mostly cardinals, robins, blue jays and eastern towhees - had eight times the normal amount of lead in their blood, 13 times the normal amount in their liver and 23 times the normal amount in their kidneys, according to the survey that compared the Missouri birds with birds captured elsewhere.

The Department of Environmental Protection says a biologist was sent out to Hirsch Lake in Runnemede, Camden County this morning after hundreds of fish were found dead.

The lake, which is called both Hirsch Lake and Runnemede Lake, is located along Singley Avenue.

Between 300 and 500 carp were found dead in the lake Thursday morning.

It appears that only the carp are being killed - no other plant or wildlife in or around the lake seem to be affected. Officials suspect a pathogen specifically affecting the carp may be responsible for the sudden fish kill.

Biologists are hoping to test the tissue of a living but sickly carp to determine if their speculation of a pathogen being the cause is correct.

State wildlife and environmental officials are investigating a die-off of thousands of fish in the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River in north-central Oklahoma.

Kills were reported on June 4 and again on Monday. The die-off has spread downstream roughly 50 river miles from the initial report near Lamont to its confluence with the main channel of the Arkansas River, which is about seven miles south of Ponca City, according to Kay County Game Warden Spencer Grace, who is investigating the kill.

There is no official estimate of the number of fish killed.

"We're looking at stretches of the river, about a mile at a time, 100 or 200 in this stretch, 50 in the next stretch. You take 100 fish times 50 miles of river, that's a lot of fish," he said.

Both Department of Wildlife Conservation and state Department of Environmental Quality officials have been to the river and taken water samples and fish samples, he said.

Grace would not speculate on the cause of the kill but said it is widespread and "catastrophic."

"I've been working on this the last three days with DEQ and it's been frustrating because so many miles of the river are dead now. There are no fish in the water, no gar, nothing. You only see the occasional turtle. You're not seeing any indicators of new fish dying so we just have to rely on the water tests now."

DEQ spokeswoman Erin Hatfield said water tests would look for a wide range of substances looked for in any fish kill, including heavy metals.

Results will be known in 10 days to two weeks, she said.

There is no official warning to prevent people from going into the water or eating fish from the river, but Grace said he would not recommend it.

Grace said the kill has hit largest fish the hardest.

"I think the smallest one I saw was about three pounds," he said.

"It's killing all aquatic life with the exception of turtles, freshwater mussels and clams. It seems to target species that live on the bottom and the big fish that hang out in those deep holes, so the catfish, buffalo, carp, some paddlefish. It is killing out fish in that system that won't be replaced in our lifetime."

The Salt Fork, which forms the Great Salt Plains Lake where it is dammed in Alfalfa County, has natural salinity but levels measured this week are "astronomical," Grace said.

Elmwood - Local beekeepers are finding millions of their bees dead just after corn was planted here in the last few weeks. Dave Schuit, who has a honey operation in Elmwood, lost 600 hives, a total of 37 million bees.

"Once the corn started to get planted our bees died by the millions," Schuit said. He and many others, including the European Union, are pointing the finger at a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids, manufactured by Bayer CropScience Inc. used in planting corn and some other crops. The European Union just recently voted to ban these insecticides for two years, beginning December 1, 2013, to be able to study how it relates to the large bee kill they are experiencing there also.

Local grower Nathan Carey from the Neustadt, and National Farmers Union Local 344 member, says he noticed this spring the lack of bees and bumblebees on his farm. He believes that there is a strong connection between the insecticide use and the death of pollinators.

"I feel like we all have something at stake with this issue," he said. He is organizing a public workshop and panel discussion about this problem at his farm June 22 at 10 a.m. He hopes that all interested parties can get together and talk about the reason bees, the prime pollinators of so any different plant species, are dying.

At the farm of Gary Kenny, south west of Hanover, eight of the 10 hives he kept for a beekeeper out of Kincardine, died this spring just after corn was planted in neighbouring fields.

What seems to be deadly to bees is that the neonicotinoid pesticides are coating corn seed and with the use of new air seeders, are blowing the pesticide dust into the air when planted. The death of millions of pollinators was looked at by American Purdue University. They found that, "Bees exhibited neurotoxic symptoms, analysis of dead bees revealed traces of thiamethoxam/clothianidin in each case. Seed treatments of field crops (primarily corn) are the only major source of these compounds.

Local investigations near Guelph, led to the same conclusion. A Pest Management Regulatory Agency investigation confirmed that corn seeds treated with clothianidin or thiamethoxam "contributed to the majority of the bee mortalities" last spring.

"The air seeders are the problem," said Ontario Federation of Agriculture director Paul Wettlaufer, who farms near Neustadt. This was after this reporter called John Gillespie, OFA Bruce County president, who told me to call Wettlaufer. Unfortunately, Wettlaufer said it was, "not a local OFA issue," and that it was an issue for the Grain Farmers of Ontario and representative, Hennry Vanakum should be notified. Vanakum could not be rached for comment.

Yet Guelph University entomologist Peter Kevan, disagreed with the EU ban.

"There's very little evidence to say that neonicotinoids, in a very general sense, in a broad scale sense, have been a major component in the demise of honeybees or any other pollinators, anywhere in the world," said Kevan.

But research is showing that honeybee disorders and high colony losses have become a global phenomena. An international team of scientists led by Holland's Utrecht University concluded that, "Large scale prophylaxic use in agriculture, their high persistence in soil and water, and their uptake by plants and translocation to flowers, neonicotinoids put pollinator services at risk." This research and others resulted in the Eurpean Union ban.

The United Church is also concerned about the death of so many pollinators and has prepared a "Take Action" paper it's sending out to all its members. The church is basing its action on local research. The Take Action paper states among other things, "Scientific information gathered suggests that the planting of corn seeds treated with neonicotinoids contributed to the majority of the bee mortalities that occurred in corn growing regions of Ontario and Quebec in Spring 2012."

Meanwhile Schuit is replacing his queen bees every few months now instead of years, as they are dying so frequently. "OMAFRA tells me to have faith. Well, I think it's criminal what is happening, and it's hard to have faith if it doesn't look like they are going to do anything anyway," Schuit says.

Experts are investigating why 25,000 bees were found dead or dying in a parking lot at a Target store in Wilsonville.

The strange sight first caught shoppers' eyes a few days ago. It's still there Wednesday, clustered under blooming European Linden trees.

"I've never seen an incident on this scale," said Pollinator Conservation Program Director Mace Vaughan.

Experts believe this could be a poisonous species of the tree that caused them to die, or they may have been poisoned by insecticides.

Conservationists Vaughan and Rich Hatfield were in Wilsonville Wednesday,filling test tubes with samples to take back to a lab. There they'll try to confirm either theory for the bees sudden deaths.

Authorities in Castile-La Mancha have declared a state of high alert and ordered the compulsory vaccination of all dogs and cats within a 18 mile radius of where the attacks took place.

The owner of the dog has been arrested for several counts of criminal negligence resulting in injury and for failing to have the correct license for a dangerous breed.

It is thought he deliberately doctored veterinary records of the pit bull-cross after bringing it into Spain from Morocco.

The dog bit three children, aged two, six and twelve, as well as a 17-year old male in the village of Arges, near Toledo, early this month. It was immediately destroyed and was confirmed to have been rabid following tests on Monday. All were discharged after being given rabies innoculations, apart from the two-year-old who was kept in hospital after being bitten in the face.

The regional government has ordered all cats, dogs and ferrets in the danger zone to be vaccinated against the disease within fifteen days. Some 60,000 dogs in 56 villages are thought to be at risk.

"We have also forbidden dogs to be allowed off the lead in public spaces until the danger has passed," confirmed Tirso Yuste, head of the regional Agriculture department.

At least seven dogs have already been identified as having high levels of rabies and have been put in quarantine for one month.

Mainland Spain was officially declared rabies free in 1975 after successful campaigns to stamp out the disease. There have been occasional examples recorded in Spain's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, cities on Morocco's Mediterranean coast.

It is understood that the rabid pit bull cross was bred in Spain but spent four months in Morocco, only returning within the last month.

Since 2010, at least three ruptured pipelines have spilled oil into U.S. neighborhoods, forcing officials to decide quickly whether local residents would be harmed if they breathed the foul air. But because there are no clear federal guidelines saying if or when the public should be evacuated during an oil spill, health officials had to use a patchwork of scientific and regulatory data designed for other situations.

As a result, residents of the three communities received different levels of protection.

No houses were evacuated in Salt Lake City, Utah, where a ruptured pipeline leaked 33,000 gallons of medium grade crude oil before it was discovered on the morning of June 12, 2010. The oil ran down Red Butte Creek, past neighborhoods where windows were left open in the summer heat. The fumes, which are known to cause drowsiness, left some people so lethargic that they didn't wake up until after noon.

In Marshall, Mich. officials called for a voluntary evacuation after more than a million gallons of heavy Canadian crude spilled into the Kalamazoo River on July 25, 2010. But they agonized over the decision for four days before making that recommendation.

In Mayflower, Ark. authorities quickly evacuated 22 families after a broken pipeline leaked about 200,000 gallons of heavy crude on March 29, 2013. But people living in the same subdivision, just a few blocks away, were not asked to leave. Neither were the residents of the lakeside community where the oil eventually pooled and where the cleanup continues today.

After each of these spills, people complained of headaches, nausea and respiratory problems - short-term symptoms that health experts say are common after any chemical spill and usually disappear as the air clears.

Experts say it may not be possible to eliminate chronic wasting disease in deer and elk in Canada.

The fatal infectious disease is so well established in Saskatchewan and Alberta that the federal government and some provinces are rethinking how to deal with what is commonly known as CWD.

In 2005, Ottawa announced a national strategy to control chronic wasting disease in the hope of finding ways to eradicate it. Now the emphasis is shifting to preventing CWD from spreading, especially in the wild.

"We have to realize that we may not be able to eradicate this disease currently from Canada, given that we don't have any effective tools, so we may be looking at switching from eradication to control," said Penny Greenwood, national manager of domestic disease control for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

The agency says it is working with the provinces and the game-ranching industry to come up with a better plan, perhaps by next spring.

"We feel that the current program that we have had in place for chronic wasting disease ... is not effective in achieving its goals," Greenwood said.

CWD is caused by abnormal proteins called prions and is similar to mad cow disease. There is no vaccine against it. Symptoms can take months or years to develop. They include weight loss, tremors, lack of co-ordination, paralysis and, ultimately, death.