The North Pacific seabirds can quickly cover hundreds of miles searching for schools of small forage fish. The die-off eventually killed an estimated 500,000 to 1 million murres from California to Alaska, eliminating 10-20% of the northeast Pacific population of the species. Seabird experts now believe
1 / 4Pacific Seabird Mass Die-offFILE - In this Jan. 5, 2016, file photo, Guy Runco, director of the Bird Treatment and Learning Center, releases a common murre near the Anchorage small boat harbor in Anchorage, Alaska. Hundreds of thousands of common murres, a fast-flying seabird, died from starvation four winters ago in the North Pacific, and a new research paper attempts to explain why. ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Common murres look like skinny penguins but fly like F-15 fighter jets.
Common murres were ambushed by effects of the northeast Pacific marine heatwave dubbed “The Blob,” according to a paper published Wednesday by 23 federal, university and private researchers in the science journal PLOS ONE. The heatwave lasted more than 700 days from 2014 to 2016, increasing water temperature and interrupting patterns in the food web from the smallest creatures to top predators.
That translated into a double whammy for murres, according to the researchers. The seabirds found that their main food source had a fraction of its usual nutrition. Murres also found themselves out-competed by large fish. Murre die-offs have occurred before but never in such numbers and never across three ecosystems, Piatt said, alluding to the California Current System, the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. Biologists with help from citizen scientists counted or collected 62,000 carcasses, although Piatt says the figure represents only a fraction of the deaths because murres spend most of their time far from shore.
Pulling together work done by oceanographers, fishery and avian disease experts and data collected by citizen scientists, Piatt and his collaborators focused on effects of the marine heat wave. The murre deaths signaled that something was wrong in the ocean but starvation, die-offs, reproduction failures or population declines were recorded in other species: cod, arrowtooth flounder, rhinoceros auklets, tufted puffins, California sea lions and Guadalupe fur seals. Seventy-nine humpback and fin whales stranded during 2015-16, mostly for “unexplained” reasons and in the Gulf of Alaska. The common thread was their reliance on forage fish.
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