Hundreds of thousands of mussels that cooked to death off the New Zealand coast are likely casualties of the climate crisis.

Resident Brandon Ferguson first drew attention to the deaths in a video posted on Facebook Feb. 9.

"THERES NO MORE MUSSELS AT THE BLUFF!! THEY'RE ALL DEAD THE WHOLE F*CKEN LOT," he wrote in shock.

Ferguson shot the video from Maunganui Bluff Beach on New Zealand's North Island, Business Insider reported. Ferguson said he discovered the green-lipped mussels while visiting the area with friends and family. The group had planned to gather mussels to eat when the tide went out, but instead found more than half a million of them already dead.

"It smelled like dead rotting seafood," Ferguson told Business Insider. "Some of the mussels were empty, some of them were dead ... Some were just floating around in the tide." Ferguson speculated that the mussels died because of rising ocean temperatures and said he had witnessed similar die-offs of other shellfish in the area due to a combination of low tides and high water temperatures. Marine scientist Andrew Jeffs of the University of Auckland largely supported Ferguson's hypothesis.

"The mussels die of heat stress. You imagine lying in the midday sun every day for four hours for the best part of a week. You'd be pretty sunburnt at the end of that," he told the New Zealand Herald, as the International Business Times reported. A New Zealand government report found that sea-surface temperatures in the country had risen between 0.1 and 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade since 1981. The report noted that rising temperatures might force some species to move. "If they are unable to move, they may not be able to survive," the report warned. Jeffs further cautioned that mussels and other mollusks could be among the species to disappear from New Zealand entirely as oceans warm.