Higher Ocean Temperatures Trigger Puffin Dieoffs - BC

Puffin colonies can't take the heat
The B.C. seabird could be doomed if global warming raises water temperatures
Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service
Tuesday, July 15, 2003

"The tufted puffin, a comical-looking seabird that flocks to windswept Triangle Island 40 kilometres off the northern tip of Vancouver island each summer, has proved to be an incredibly sensitive indicator of climate change.

Even slight changes in ocean temperature can -- and have - triggered mass starvation of chicks on the island, the biggest tufted puffin colony in Canada which attracts close to 50,000 of the birds to its rocky bluffs every year, say biologists.

'The difference between 1998 and 1999 was one of the most striking things I have ever seen in my career in ecology,' says Doug Bertram, a marine bird specialist at the Canadian Wildlife Service, recalling how dead chicks littered the colony in 1998. Bertram is one of the co-authors of the report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which details how the puffin's fate is closely tied to ocean temperatures.

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Bertram says things have gone 'pretty well' since the ocean returned to a cooler regime in 1999.

But he, like his co-authors, says forecasts for a warmer global climate do not bode well for the colony.

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The chicks do well when the temperature hovers between 8.9 and 9.9 degrees Celsius during breeding months. But, if it exceeds 10 degrees the failure rate rockets as it did in 1994 and 1996-98.

The parent puffins, which at first flew back and forth to their burrows several times a day with fish for the chicks, abandoned their young. The hungry chicks left their burrows and died on the slopes and beaches of the rocky colony.

'They'd stand there peeping away,' says co-author Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a biologist now at the University of Alberta, who did field work on Triangle in 1995 and 1996. She recalls how the chicks, which were healthy 'bowling balls,' in 1995, were 'fluff and bone' in 1996. 'It was so sad,' she said."

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Vancouver Sun

The Dovekie is another Alcid (family Alcidae includes Puffin, Murres and Auklets) declined at the south end of it's breeding range as the pack ice retreated during the late 60's. As far as I know this was one of the earliest (though not conclusively proven) indicator of Climate Change (Global Warming). I don't have a link except to a Dovekie site. Dovekies are small and Penguin-ishly cute.

Dovekie:http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i0340id.html

The decline may be a result of warmer waters that lessens water oxygen levels, disrupt currents which affect food chains. There may also be increased activities of pollutants in warmer waters. Most Alcids, like the Polar Bear, are adapted to cooler climates and there may be physiological stresses in warmer weather as seems to be the case of the Puffin of the Pacific NW. The Atlantic Puffin is very similar and efforts to re-introduced to islands where they once bred has met with some success in the North Atlantic.

The flightless Great Auk was the Alcid's Northern Hemispheric equivalent of a penguin is extinct -- a huge loss!