worse than those of 1976 and 2003, the current drought leads to an excess mortality of fish, birds and mammals due to the historical drying up of rivers and soils.
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Helped carp in the Breton-Vendée marsh, between Noirmoutier and Saint-Jean-de-Monts (Vendée). Death by dozens of hinds and deer in the Sierra de Baza natural park, near Granada, in southern Spain. Asphyxiation of hundreds of frogs following the virtual period of Lake Petrus in the Mercantour, on the Italian border. The unprecedented drought that is currently raging in western Europe, the worst since the start of the statements in 1959, is a disaster for wildlife.
“And again! We only see the part of the iceberg”, alerts Jean-Noël Rieffel, director of the French Biodiversity Office (OFB) in the Center-Val de Loire region. “The situation is historically very degraded and 2022 promises to be a reference year in terms of excess mortality of aquatic and terrestrial species”, he predicts.
Underground, in an invisible way, an infinity of insects and invertebrates die of drying. The soil humidity index is lower than that recorded in previous historical droughts, in 1976 and 2003, according to CNRS measures. In places, all microorganisms disappear and with them, the functions they play in the food chain, explains the OFB, an establishment under the supervision of the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
multiplication of assemblies
This is how wild boars appear near the irrigation pipes or on the beaches. In the absence of beetles, lumbrics and caterpillars, and even snails and slugs which usually constitute their replacement diet when the first come to miss, the hedgehogs pay a heavy price, traversing kilometers to find food. Many of them finish crushed on the roads.
The hedgehog is a sentinel animal. Its behavior gives the alarm, when the state of the ecosystem which shelters it degrades. Same thing with the green burst. According to the Global Fund for Nature (WWF), the amphibian present in the ponds, ponds and lakes of the northern half of France is among the first species to be affected by the drying up of wetlands and water pollution. It appears on the list of endangered species of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
In aquatic environments, the effects of drought are palpable. At the beginning of August, in Orleans, the temperature of the Loire amounted to 31 ° C. On July 15, the temperature of the last wild river of the old continent, with the Vjosa, Albania, even reached a peak at 32 ° C. “This level, rarely reached in the past, turns out to be lethal for many fish. It causes a disaster among great migrants such as shamon or salmon of Loire-Allier, last wild strain of Western Europe, which usually go back The river in this season, “observes Mr. Rieffel.
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