Thousands of birds fall from the sky. Millions of fish wash up on the shore. Honey bee populations decimated. Bats overtaken by a deadly fungus. Piglets die in droves from a mysterious disease. Toxic algal blooms that kill. These and other stories of mass animal deaths seem to be happening quite frequently these days.
Researchers from the University of San Diego, UC Berkeley and Yale have collaborated to review the growing list of mass die-offs in the scientific literature for the last 70 years. They have identified 2,407 global populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and marine invertebrates that have had “mass mortality events,” as they call them.
Their analysis was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They said that not only are these events becoming more frequent, they are also increasing in magnitude, with the number of fatalities higher for birds, fish and marine invertebrates. They also reported that thirty-five events completely or nearly wiped out an entire population. Over the last 70 years, there has been at least one more mass mortality event each year going from one event per year, to 70 each year. The cumulative death toll reaches into the billions.
“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now…” Romans 8:22
“While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast. “The earth mourneth and fadeth away,” “The haughty people . . . do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.’” Isaiah 24:4, 5. The Great Controversy, page 589, 590
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