Overlooking the rocks at King Harbor in Redondo Beach, seagulls circle overhead, soaring down into the silver-tinged water. Spread across the top of the water, dead sardines placate the harbor. One day after it was discovered at least a million sardines had died and the community looks to clean-up and figure out how this happened.

“It was just a matter of oxygen concentration, the water was less than 1 parts per million oxygen particles, the average is 7 to 8 million parts per million,” Jeanne Bellmin, professor of zoology said.

Bellmin, who takes her marine biology class to the the King Harbor Yacht Club every semester added that according to the sea lab workers the sardines got trapped due to the rains that Los Angeles had been experiencing, which may have prevented the sardines from swimming out of the harbor. They swam into the harbor seeking shelter and they just kept circling, Bellmin said.

“A heavy surge caused a storm and they couldn’t get out of the harbor. I am not sure how that would have happened though,” Bellmin said. “I don’t understand why the water was so strong that they couldn’t go out.”

Sara Kelly, a La Mirada resident, drove 45 minutes to Redondo Beach to assist in the clean-up despite obstacles from some workers who told her she couldn’t help.

“I’ve been out here an hour and a half and I filled up three or four buckets. It is hard to clean up since all the fish are stuck at the bottom,” Kelly said.

As clean-up efforts are underway, Bellmin said that with so many dead sardines it will create more problems for oceanic life compounded with the fact that there is hardly any algae or toxins in the harbor to create oxygen.

“Rotting bodies will make oxygen more depleted and then more ocean life will die,” Bellmin said.

The dead sardines are drawing comparisons to a past incident when hundreds of birds just suddenly fell out of the sky.

“I thought about the dead birds and wondered if they were connected,” Erika Huerta, 21, liberal studies, major said.

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