Just after getting off the ferry last week and starting our long drive home from Vancouver BC to Vancouver WA, Ron and I watched in awe as a bald eagle swooped down and caught a huge fish. Then as I watched the videos I took of this eagle and others who wanted this big catch, I realized that this was no fish. It was a bird. Then a day later when my husband and golden retriever went to the river, Ron found a large dead bird on the beach of the Columbia. He showed me pictures after he got home. And then I saw the news story about the great die off of thousands of murres due to the deadly human caused warming of our oceans. And it hit us both that these dead birds were murres and part of this massive die off. Breaks my heart!
We humans must wake up and unite and act together to face head on the reality of the sixth major extinction and climate emergency that we’re in. We’re beyond out of time to continue being complicit with the fossil fuel industry and corporate politicians from both political parties whose allegiance is with their corporate donor friends and who are, therefore, nothing short of merchants of death.
The horror of what is happening with murres and humans and species worldwide must be seen for the crisis that it is. There is an absolute urgency that we humans unite to address this greatest emergency that humankind has ever faced. We’re all family, all in this together. Please. Let’s work together to make the impossible possible. This is my deepest prayer. Everything we love and cherish is at stake. 🙏 Molly
By DAVID NIELD
Scientists have reported on another devastating biological disaster, caused by a patch of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean known as 'the Blob'.
This concentrated marine heatwave lingered in the northeast Pacific between 2013 and 2016, and researchers now think it was largely responsible for the death of almost a million common murres (Uria aalge), amongst other wildlife. This makes it the largest seabird die-off in recorded history.
The estimate is based on some 62,000 murres that washed ashore on the west coast of the US during 2015 and 2016, covering an area stretching from California to Alaska. Only a fraction of birds that die at sea typically wash ashore, indicating the scale of the mass dying was much larger than the number of bodies we've found.
The emaciated birds were left starved by a lack of food, caused by increased competition in the warmer waters, according to the scientists – and numerous other species may have been hit by the same confluence of factors.
"Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often," says biologist Julia Parrish, from the University of Washington.
"We believe that the smoking gun for common murres – beyond the marine heat wave itself – was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock and Pacific cod greatly increased."
The team reviewed studies of fish and plankton collected by fisheries during the time the blob was at its peak, as well as other field studies and reports, and concluded that the warmer temperatures in the water had increased the metabolism of these cold-blooded ocean dwellers.
That meant predatory fish would have been eating more than usual, and that's likely to have caused pressure on the top of the food chain. In the end, the schools of forage fish that murres rely on would've become very hard to find.
While the common murre is one of the most resilient birds around – feeding on small 'forage fish' like herring, sardines, anchovies and young salmon – it was unable to cope with the effects of the blob.
Please continue this article here: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-blob-has-been-implicated-in-an-unprecedented-mass-seabird-death
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