Posted March 06, 2018 21:04:49

Thousands of dead starfish have washed up on a beach in the town of Ramsgate in England's south-east, after a week of freezing weather and winter storms.

Social media videos show some of the marine invertebrates in pieces following days of sub-zero temperatures that froze much of Britain from last Tuesday (local time) to Saturday.

Ramsgate resident Chris Constantine who filmed the scene said "to see so many thousands dead on our beach was unsettling".

There were also dead lobsters, crabs, gulls and fish on the beach, he said.

Mr Constantine said while dead marine animals washed up on the coast after storms and temperature changes had in the past, he had not witnessed anything on this scale.

The UK's Marine Conservation Society said on its website "the cause appears to be a combination of the extreme cold (where shallow water has frozen, or come close to freezing) and the depth at which storm waves have penetrated".

"Most animals become slow moving, even torpid, when cold so would have little opportunity to escape tempestuous waves," it wrote.

"The southern North Sea is particularly shallow, so there may have been few "safe" sites (for marine life) to take shelter in."

Beach-goers are ankle-deep in crabs, starfish, mussels and lobsters in places along the Holderness coast in Yorkshire, according to the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.

All of the animals piled up on the shore were dead, except for some of the lobsters.

"There was a 3 degree [Celsius] drop in sea temperature last week which will have caused animals to hunker down and reduce their activity levels," Bex Lynam, from the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, said.

"This makes them vulnerable to rough seas — they became dislodged by large waves and washed ashore when the rough weather kicked in.

"Larger animals such as dolphins are more mobile and can save themselves by swimming away when this sort of thing happens."

The trust's team has been working with local fisherman to rescue the surviving lobsters, collecting them in buckets and taking them to tanks for care.

They plan to return the animals to the sea when the weather improves.

ABC/Reuters

Topics: weather, oceans-and-reefs, animals, storm-event, conservation, environment, united-kingdom, england