Thousands of washed-up clams cause horrible smell on Revere Beach

Thousands of dead clams have washed onto Revere Beach, causing a foul smell that has beachgoers holding their noses.

Crews spent the day burying the clams Wednesday as puzzled residents try to make sense of what could be causing all these clams to wash up on shore.

The smell, while confined to the south part of the beach, is so strong and pungent Boston 25 News crews reported smelling it before they even got out of the car.

"Seafood being left out in the sun for a few days for too long, just baking in the sun," one resident said, describing the stench.

DCR crews said they are still trying to figure out what could have caused thousands of baby surf clams to have washed up along the shore. This is the third time clams have washed up and it's leaving residents puzzled.

"It started last month but this is the first time that I can remember it smelling so bad for so long," said Ronnie Hood. "Once you get down here past Kelly's, all the way down to MGH it smells like rotten clams."

Hood and his daughter watched as DCR crews buried the clams in the sand in an attempt to mitigate the smell.

"There’s definitely something going on with the ecological system," said Hood.

A spokesperson for a local conservation group agrees, saying, "what we’re looking at is almost a perfect storm of events where we had a lot of clams, we had storming, that threw them into the shallow warmer water, some of them died and lots of them ended up on the beach."

The Division of Marine Fisheries has taken samples of the baby clams to find out why these thousands of clams have washed up on the beach.

>> LIVE BLOG: Shark sightings, encounters in and around Massachusetts

Cox Media Group