It may look like the scene of an oil spill, but it’s happening on our national mall — an estimated thousand or more fish have been found floating dead in the pond on the mall between the Vietnam Memorial and the WWII Memorial, reports WTOP.
The two-inch long blue gills are being removed by the National Park Service so they can study what may have caused the mass death.
Kristen Hamilton of the NPS said, “There’s a number of environmental factors, from certain types of algae to low- dissolved oxygen in the water.”
Luckily, the pond is downwind from the monuments, so visitors to the mall won’t have to smell rotting fish carcasses.
NPS says it will test algae levels and that this isn’t highly unusual. However, it does seem suspicious when a thousand fish suddenly die in our nation’s capital.