Hungry seabirds off Alaskan coast point to climate change threat

Dead and dying seabirds that have collected on the shores of the northern Bering and southern Chukchi seas over the past six years reveal how the rapidly changing climate of the Arctic is threatening ecosystems and the people who live there, according to a report released Tuesday by US scientists.

Local communities have reported numerous weakened seabird bodies, including shearwaters, auklets, and murres, that often eat plankton, krill or fish but seem to have trouble finding enough food. Scientists say the hundreds of distressed and dead birds are only a fraction of those starving.

“Since 2017, we’ve had multiple seabird deaths in the Bering Strait area,” said Gay Sheffield, a biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a co-author of the report. “The only thing in common is weakness or hunger.”

Seabirds are struggling with climate-related ecosystem changes that can affect the supply and timing of available food, as well as a harmful algal bloom and a viral outbreak in the region, he said.

And their dangers endanger human communities as well: “Birds are so important to our region – they’re so important nutritionally and economically,” Sheffield said.

Data on seabirds are part of an annual report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called the “Arctic Report Card,” which documents changes in a region that is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth.

“With climate change, the food chain is changing rapidly,” said Don Lyons, a conservation scientist at the National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute, who was not involved in the report. “Food is as unpredictable as it used to be in terms of where the food is at at different times of the year.”

Lyons said that although seabirds naturally experience some lean years, the report documents an alarming pattern. “It looks like we’ve passed a tipping point – we’ve moved to a new regime where events that we used to think were rare and unusual are now common and frequent.”

According to the report, annual surface air temperatures in the Arctic last year were the sixth warmest since records began in 1900. And satellite records revealed that for several weeks last summer, large areas of sea ice near the Arctic were almost completely clear.

“Sea ice coverage was well below the long-term average,” said Walt Meier, a sea ice expert at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-author of the report.

“The most notable thing we saw was that during the summer we saw a lot of open water areas near the Arctic that were once very rare,” he said. “A few hundred kilometers from the North Pole, a few kilometers with little or no ice.”

“Changes in the Arctic are very rapid and profound,” said Peter Marra, a conservation biologist at Georgetown University, who was not involved in the report.

“We need to do a much better job of monitoring these sentinel populations,” Marra said, noting that seabirds are metaphorical canaries in coal mines when it comes to showing wider ecosystem changes.

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