Julia Baum

Thanks so much for having me, David.

Well, actually, really similar things to what people encounter.

So the heat dome here in B.C.

in 2021 actually was deadly for a lot of people.

As I'm sure you know, the town of Lytton burnt to the ground.

There were about 600 people that perished in that heat wave.

And it was similarly stressful for animals.

So everyone was feeling the heat out here.

We found really widespread effects of the heat wave on animals as well as plants.

Basically, any type of organism that couldn't get up and managed to escape it somehow really suffered.

All the other things living alongside the mussels on our coastline.

So any what we call marine invertebrates, so mussels, barnacles, oysters, things like that, because they live on our rocky coastline, right?

So they're basically sitting on this very exposed rocks.

And if you think about, you know, how much a parking lot, concrete in a parking lot heats up on a hot day, kind of similar thing.

So in general, we had temperatures here,

Where I am in Victoria, around 35 to 40 degrees.

But on those rocky coastlines, the temperatures were getting up to about 50 degrees Celsius.

And those organisms, obviously, they're attached to the rocks.

They couldn't move.

And so they just baked by the millions, possibly up to billions.