DENVER — Boneyard beaches littered with dead tilapia line the shores of California's Salton Sea. Thousands of fish die here every year, suffocated when winds stir up low-oxygen water from the lake depths.


A fascinating and foul discovery on the skeleton-clad shores recently revealed the fate of the rest of the fish remains. Their flesh drops to the lake floor, where anaerobic bacteria transforms it into adipocere, also known as corpse wax, researchers from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania reported here Monday (Oct. 28) at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting.

Perhaps disturbed by fierce winds, globs of decomposed fish flesh recently rose from deep in the Salton Sea, coagulated into spheres on the lake surface and surfed the waves to shore, leaving the high-water line littered with thousands of sticky fish balls.

"We had putty knives with us, and we had to scrape them off our boots. That adhesive property is fundamental to adipocere," said Kutztown sedimentologist Edward Simpson, a study co-author.