'Mass Die-Off' Found at Malibu's Surfrider Beach

The stench of death recently arrived at Malibu's  and the surrounding area. Sarah Sikich, Heal the Bay's coastal resources director, recently wrote about what she called a "mass die-off of marine life" in the blog Spouting Off.

She wrote in the Oct. 14 entry that Heal the Bay has contacted marine ecologists and invertebrate specialists to determine the cause of the massive death, "but we have found no clear cause."

"It's impossible to walk along the stretch of beach between the  and the Colony without noticing the thousands of dead urchins washed ashore, strewn amid the seaweed, driftwood and swarms of kelp flies," Sikich wrote. "There's even an occasional dead lobster, sea hare and seabird in the mix."

Sikich wrote that the massive death "seems to have coincided with the breaching of " that took place the previous week. The breach occurred near Third Point, Sikich wrote, around the time of the recent major rainstorm.

"There is a reason the first major storm of the year is called 'first flush,'" Sikich wrote. "All of the pollution that has accumulated in the watershed and the lagoon over the last six months was flushed out to Surfrider. The urban slobber poured across the nearby reef, coinciding with the large-scale invertebrate die-off."

Sikich wrote that a similar "die-off" happened a year ago "after someone artificially and illegally breached the lagoon in advance of projected good surf." She did not mention him by name, but she was writing about Malibu surfer Andy Lyon.

Lyon, who was forced to do 10 hours of beach cleanup as punishment for his action, wrote in an email to Malibu Patch that when he breached the lagoon, it was already breaching.

"I just went further up the beach and started it there before it got too far out of control down inside," Lyon wrote.

He added, "The urchins die when the fresh water hits them every year. And then [Heal the Bay] puts up pictures of a dead bird and tries to blame it on the breaching?"