A Marine Mystery: What's Causing Seabird Die-Offs in Alaska?

[OKIsItJustMe]

Last edited Fri Dec 23, 2016, 06:46 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.usgs.gov/news/a-marine-mystery-what-s-causing-seabird-die-offs-alaska

[font face=Serif][font size=5]A Marine Mystery: What’s Causing Seabird Die-Offs in Alaska?[/font]


Release Date: December 8, 2016

[font size=3]A beach littered with bird carcasses is a sobering sight. Since mid-October, hundreds of dead seabirds have washed ashore the north and east sides of St. Paul Island, Alaska, an otherwise serene volcanic island landscape in the Bering Sea.

Most of the carcasses being found are tufted puffins, a charismatic species of seabird with striking, silky tassels of feathers positioned like ponytails behind their white-masked eyes. However, horned puffins, murres and crested auklets have washed ashore as well, according to biologists from the Aleut Community of the St. Paul Island Tribal Government Ecosystem Conservation Office (ACSPI ECO).

“Seabirds, including puffins, are important to local residents for their cultural and subsistence uses, and are appreciated by bird watchers from around the world,” said John Pearce, a scientist with the USGS Alaska Science Center. “Seabirds can also provide important signals about local conditions in the marine environment, such as the abundance and availability of forage fish.”

The ACSPI ECO and Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) reported to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that as of November 17, the encounter rate of puffin carcasses over a three-week period was hundreds of times greater than normal compared to past surveys at St. Paul. In total, nearly 300 carcasses of a variety of beached seabird species have been counted since mid-October.

Only a fraction of birds that die at sea become beached, and of those, only a small portion are observed by people before they are removed by scavengers. As a result, many more birds may be affected by the die-off than has been recorded.

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[MFM008]

1. Fukashima?

Plastic?

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Warmer Waters May Be Killing Hundreds of Puffins in Alaska, Scientists Say

https://weather.com/science/nature/news/alaska-puffins-mass-death-warm-ocean-waters

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Warmer Waters May Be Killing Hundreds of Puffins in Alaska, Scientists Say[/font]


By Ada Carr | Published Nov 10 2016 03:53 PM EST | weather.com

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The scientists suspect that record-warm temperatures in the water are a key factor in the mass deaths of the birds.

Within the last few months, warmer ocean temperatures have resurfaced, causing a horseshoe-shaped warmer-than-average pool of water that stretches from the Gulf of Alaska and the northern Pacific to the West Coast and southwestward into the central Pacific’s equatorial region.

"The Bering Sea has been off-the-charts warm," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Southwest Fisheries Science Center ecologist Nate Mantua told National Geographic. "We've never seen anything like this. We're in uncharted territory. We're in the midst of an extraordinary time.”

Researchers suspect this shifted the ocean food web by sapping the waters of the zooplankton that forms the base of the food web, causing big downturns for marine life from everything to fur seals down to salmon and crabs, reports National Geographic.

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[Boomer]

3. Ocean food chain collapse

This should be front page news, but of course it's only a footnote in passing. When we go down, it will be fast and we won't see it coming because so few people pay any attention to the significance of sea birds that are starving to death.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Sad to say, I would guess that many in "the media" do not understand the sugnificance

Similarly, their audiences do not either.

Recently, I was in a conversation with a reasonably intelligent person. I mentioned that we were getting more snows in Autumn (i.e. before Winter officially begins) but fewer in Spring (after Winter has officially ended) and her sincere reaction was that more ski resorts were making “artificial snow” (so, it wasn’t a problem.)