A New Study About the Death of 1 Million Seabirds Should Scare the Crap Out of You

[babylonsister]

A New Study About the Death of 1 Million Seabirds Should Scare the Crap Out of You
We mourn the common murres.
Jackie Mogensen


Over just two days in early 2016, more than 6,000 penguin-like birds were found dead on the rocky beaches near Whittier, Alaska. Many of the dead birds, scientists observed, were clearly emaciated.

“It was pretty horrifying,” seabird biologist David Irons told a Canadian news outlet at the time. “The live ones standing along the dead ones were even worse.”

But the death of these 6,540 “common murres” wasn’t an isolated incident. Between the summer of 2015 and spring of 2016, tens of thousands of them washed up on Pacific beaches from Alaska all the way down to California in what scientists called an “astonishing” extreme mortality event for the species. (Other marine animal deaths and disappearances during the same time period—including additional seabird species, Pacific cod, sea lions, Guadalupe fur seals, and humpback whales—for the most part, went unexplained.)

Something, experts quickly concluded, was causing the birds to starve to death, but until now, it was unclear what exactly was to blame. In a new paper, published Wednesday in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, more than 20 researchers link the murre die-off to a colossal mass of warm ocean water—colloquially, scientists called it the “Blob”—which spanned hundreds of miles across in the Pacific Ocean around the same time the dead murres carcasses were crowding the coasts. Marine heatwaves like the one that created the Blob have become more frequent in the past century and will likely worsen as Earth’s temperatures continue to rise with climate change.

One of North America’s most abundant seabirds, murres can fly more than 60 miles per hour and dive up to 650 feet in depth to catch schooling fish. The bird is built like a “jet fighter,” John Piatt, a research wildlife biologist at the US Geological Survey and the lead author on the study, tells Mother Jones. But to have all that explosive energy, the birds must find and consume a lot of food—about half their body mass per day. That high demand for energy is the murres’ “Achilles heel,” he says. Without food, murres can starve in as little as three days.

The birds’ food sensitivity makes them a good indicator of ocean health. Some murre deaths in any given season are normal, Piatt says, and die-offs have occurred during storms and other extreme warm-water events in the past. But what happened in the Pacific in 2015 and 2016, he says, was “beyond anything anybody’s ever seen.” Something in the ocean was way out of whack.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/01/a-new-study-death-of-1-million-common-murres/

[cilla4progress]

1. I'm terrified to death

every day... and sad.

[getagrip_already]

2. a billion here, a billion there....

Sooner or later the republicans will blame it on the dems.

Then it will be all out fault.

[onethatcares]

3. our planet is dieing, or dying or whatever

and there's no fixing it, no miraculous star of hollywood save the day and bring us back from the edge of extinction.

when the oceans die, when the forests are killed, when the lands are raped, there isn't too much to look forward to.

We done fucked it all up in a short time. If you have any rescue plans, please let us all in on them.

Thanks.

[Blue_true]

5. The planet will be fine. It has already gone through five similar events.

What won't be fine is life on the planet, masses of it will be killed off by the human driven Sixth Mass Extinction of life on the planet. Once we are dead, the planet will do what it has always done, serve as host to new life forms.

[Bayard]

4. More....

"Alarmingly, they also documented 22 separate “breeding failures”—when a colony produces zero chicks—in the region during and after the die-off. As Piatt explains, one failure in any given year would have been unusual. “To have repeated failures at large, important colonies?” he says, “That’s unprecedented.”"