"Dead Zones Haunt Green Bay as Manure Fuels Algae Blooms"

"Nearly 400 years after French voyageur Jean Nicolet arrived with a bang on the banks of lower Green Bay — he fired two pistols skyward to announce the white man's arrival in the world's largest freshwater estuary — the same stretch of shoreline was the scene of another fateful landing.

Phones at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources started ringing in early August 2005 with an outrageous tale of a mass migration of fish from the center of the bay to its rocky beaches.

"The report from the caller was 100,000s of dead and dying small fish nosed up against the shore," Paul Peeters, a DNR fisheries biologist, reported in an email to his bosses at the time."

Dan Egan reports for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinell September 13, 2014.