Scientists search for cause of puffin population crash

GreenWire: Scientists are enlisting puffins — short, stubby birds with lopsided beaks — to investigate the steep decline of seabirds across the British Isles.

Over the past eight years, seabird numbers in the North Sea have declined by up to 40 percent. And just last year, the puffin population crashed, with malnourished puffins washing up on beaches all along the United Kingdom’s coast.

On an archipelago 50 miles off the Northumberland coast, scientists are affixing small digital recorders onto the backs of up to three dozen puffins. The recorders will monitor their movements using GPS and other technologies. It’s hoped that the study will shed more light on puffins’ lives at sea, said Richard Bevan, a zoologist at Newcastle University.

“All we can record at the nests is the number of chicks, how quickly the chicks are growing and the numbers that fledge,” he said. “But what we don’t know is what they do as soon as they fly away.”

The data should help establish whether puffins have regular feeding grounds and if those feeding grounds are expanding due to the regional decline of sandeel, the slender fish that is their primary food source. Sandeel have been in decline for a decade, though whether this decline has been caused by climate change or increased trawling is debatable.

Bevan believes the population crash of last season may be explained by ill-timed north-easterly winds, which cooled the seas during breeding season. But there are many changes to the marine environment that are not understood, Bevan said.

“We don’t know what’s happening out there,” he said. “There’s a change in the ecology of the North Sea. What the implications are of that, we have no idea” (Severin Carrell, Guardian, July 1). – PV

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