Cold weather fills Cape Coral canals with dead, smelly fish

An awful smell that is so strong it makes you want to close all your doors and windows has taken over Cape Coral canals.

Dead fish are floating on and around the docks of the Cape Coral canal along SW Third Lane.

“By early afternoon, there were dead fish all over the canal get started smelling from all over the canal. And they were just popping up, and we got big little. I mean, there are some big catfish down there. And then they just started getting worse and worse. And now today is just horrendous,” said Barbara Suhre.

Suhre and her husband Bill have lived along the canal for six years. The dead fish and smell are not what they paid for.

“You can’t even be outside. We set our shutters down and go inside because it smells so bad. And we’re out here all the time. This is our living room here,” Barbara Suhre said

“We tried to clean up some of the fish plates, trying to scoop them out into the canal, and there’s all bad side. So what we were blew out yesterday apparently blowing back today triple,” said Bill Suhre.

So what’s causing these conditions? WINK News asked Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Scientist Theresa Cody. “We think that the kills, the reports of kills that we have received are mostly due to cold temperatures.”

If people want to try to clean this themselves, they must be careful.

“Wear double gloved because fish have spines. And most of the reports that we’ve been getting, the fish have been decomposed. So there’s a lot of bacteria, and even when they’re not decomposed, there’s a lot of bacteria. They get spined they can get an infection,” said Cody,

Cody said she expects we’re at the end of the cold kills now that we’re back to very warm temperatures.