They found the victims floating in the water. Some had eyeballs full of air bubbles, others had their stomachs pushed up into their mouths. Many had severe internal bleeding.<\/p>\n
Volcanoes can be life-threatening for fish. A major eruption in 2011 in Chile, for instance, killed 4.5 million of them<\/a>. Researchers have studied how lava flows, hot gases, and deadly debris can cause mass die-offs or even cut fish off from the sea in suddenly landlocked lakes<\/a>. But few have been able to document in detail the grisly fates experienced by the unlucky fish that find themselves at the mercy of an angry volcano. That\u2019s why when one erupted underwater off the coast of El Hierro in the Canary Islands for 150 days in late 2011 and early 2012, researchers including Ayoze Castro Alonso at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria saw the perfect opportunity to study the intricacies of these piscine casualties.<\/p>\n Ten years later, the devastating eruption of a terrestrial volcano on nearby La Palma, another of the Canary Islands, gave Alonso and his colleagues a chance to see an altogether different way that volcanoes can butcher unsuspecting fish\u2014by overwhelming them with debris.<\/p>\n The scientists detail in a new paper<\/a> the shocking injuries suffered by 49 fishes killed by the El Hierro eruption and 14 fishes killed by the volcanism near La Palma. \u201cIt\u2019s a volcanic eruption in both cases, but the pathological syndromes are completely different,\u201d says Alonso. \u201cOne is acute, the other is chronic.\u201d<\/p>\n