A bunker kill, which reminds me of the time ....

Thousands of dead menhaden (bunker, in CT) wash ashore on Texas beach.

County officials said warmer water, which can’t hold as much oxygen as cooler water, was to blame for the mass fish deaths. 

Shallow waters warm more quickly and if Menhaden become trapped, they will suffer from hypoxia, a state where oxygen levels are insufficient to maintain homeostasis. In these circumstances, the fish will behave more erratically, further depleting their oxygen levels. 

Another reason for the lack of oxygen in the water is cloudy skies blocking microscopic phytoplankton or macroalgae from photosynthesis. 

"So in a nutshell, it was the perfect storm to deplete oxygen levels inshore," Quintana Beach County Park said. 

These things happen, especially when bunker are driven into shallow waters by predators. Back in the 80s, when bunker were plentiful (Russian fishing trawlers later did them in) and bluefish were swarming, a huge school —tens of thousands, I’d estimate — of bunker was driven into the warm waters of Cos Cob Harbor by pursuing bluefish and suffocated. The stench that arose during the following hot, summer days was astonishing, and residents along the shore (and drivers along the Post Road’s Cos Cob bridge), pleaded with our town fathers to send in earth-moving equipment to deal with the olfactory assault on their delicate noses. Then-First Selectman John Margenot, wise steward of the taxpayers’ dollar that he was, declined: “God put them there”, he intoned, “and God will take them away.”

And He did, eventually, although it took a week or so before the people’s prayers for divine intervention reached Heaven and stirred Him to act, and even then, He merely commanded the sun to remain hot enough to rot the unfortunate piscatory victims while commanding the area’s seagull population to gather in Cos Cob for a seafood festival.

Anyway, it all worked out; you don’t see any of those bunker still piled on our shores today, do you? Patience is key in situations like this, even if it’s so often undervalued.