Winter storm blamed for thousands of dead fish floating in Mississippi Gulf Coast bayous

Winter storm blamed for thousands of dead fish floating in Mississippi Gulf Coast bayous

Winter storm blamed for thousands of dead fish floating in Mississippi Gulf Coast bayous

Winter storm blamed for thousands of dead fish floating in Mississippi Gulf Coast bayous

Winter storm blamed for thousands of dead fish floating in Mississippi Gulf Coast bayous

Residents in Jackson County are dealing with thousands of dead fish floating in area bayous.
Published: Feb. 3, 2025 at 7:10 PM CST|Updated: 13 hours ago

GULF COAST, Miss. (WLOX) – Hundreds of thousands of dead mullet drifting down bayous along southeast Mississippi were victims of the historic snowstorm that swept across the Gulf Coast late last month.

The decomposing fish could be seen – and smelled – in and around Davis Bayou in Ocean Springs.

Authorities with the Mississippi Department of Marine Research say as many, maybe more, were also spotted in Grand Bay.

“There are differing areas of concentration, especially with these fish across the board,” DMR Finfish Bureau Director Trevor Moncrief told WLOX News Now. “So, in Grand Bay, there is a stretch of area where we saw over 100,000 mullet, and like the one in Davis Bayou there was certainly a few hundred in there and then some of them were sparse. It’s hard to put a total number on these kind of events, but we do the best we can to figure out what the impact could be.”

According to Moncrief, the hardest hit area in the state right now is Grand Bay, because it’s the shallowest fishery in the area.

He said most of the interior of the fishery, the Pascagoula drainage, the Biloxi drainage and Bay St. Louis (west out to Cat Island) all seem to be relatively unscathed aside from the occasional mullet.

The stench was palpable on Monday as the decaying carcasses continued to float by the waterfront homes along the bayou following the unprecedented arctic blast on January 21.

“All of a sudden they started coming and didn’t stop,” Ocean Springs native and artist Ginger Woechan recalled, who celebrated her birthday on the first day of the blizzard. “It’s probably going to be another week or two before they drift away, but the smell might linger.”

Woechan’s next-door neighbor, Ed Cochran, a retired science teacher in Jackson County, said the temperatures played a key role in thousands of fish coming and floating along the surface.

“We had four days of sub-freezing weather, got down to about 24-, 25F up in here,” he said. “A lot of times we get cold weather and they just come in along the surface, but this time it got too cold and they died.”

Cochran showed WLOX a bend in the bayou that still contained large amounts of dead fish caught in the saltgrass. He said the numbers were 10 times that last week.

“You see all that white over there? That’s all dead mullet,” Cochran pointed out. “It was worse than that. I don’t know where they are going; maybe some are starting to drop to the bottom.

“But I try to fish out here, but the crabs still eat my minnows even with all this food out here – guess they want something live.”

Moncrief says the numbers of decomposing mullet should go down within the week, but that there’s still a concern of potential secondary kills as the dissolved oxygen begins to run out in the water.

“The short term, we are seeing the rotting fish,“ Moncrief explained. ”Long term, it is difficult to say. Best we can do is monitor it. Based on the observations we’ve had across the board, it seems like we dodged a bullet here mainly because the interior of the fishery, as I mentioned before, remained relatively unscathed outside of mullet and that’s good news for us.”

In the meantime, Moncrief assures that DMR is monitoring the situation closely for further developments.

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