Hannah Gardner

Special for USA TODAY

BEIJING — Thirty-five tons of dead fish washed up in a lake in China this week.

Residents of Haikou city on China’s southern Hainan island began noticing the dead white and yellow fish on Wednesday.

The fish — members of the herring family — were likely pushed up an estuary by a tidal surge and then got caught in a pumping system that deposited them in the lake, according to Hainan.net, a local news website.

More than 100 sanitation workers were mobilized to scoop up the fish which floated to the lake's surface over a period of two days.

The workers bagged up the fish and sent them to garbage incinerators to prevent them being sold at a local food market, Hainan.net said.