After 60 million years of extreme living, seabirds are crashing

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/sep/22/after-60-million-years-of-extreme-living-seabirds-are-crashing

Jeremy Hance
Sept. 22, 2015

Every day for sixty million years, seabirds have performed mind-boggling acts of derring-do: circumnavigating the globe without rest, diving more than 200 meters in treacherous seas for a bite of lunch, braving the most unpredictable weather on the planet as if it were just another Tuesday and finding their way home in waters with few, if any, landmarks.

But now seabirds, like so many other species, may have met their match.

Conservationists have long known that many seabird populations are in decline, but a recent paper in PLOS ONE finds the situation worse than anticipated. According to the researchers, seabird abundance has dropped 69.7% in just 60 years – representing the deaths of some 230 million animals.

“I was very surprised with the result, it was considerably greater than I’d expected,” said Edd Hammill, co-author of the paper, with Utah State University. “What we should take away from this is that something is serious amiss in the oceans.”

Ben Lascelles, a Senior Marine Officer with Birdlife International, who was not involved in the study, said he found the research alarming because the decline appeared practically indiscriminate, hitting a “large number of species across a number of families.”

•••••

But, given that seabirds inhabit both the open ocean and the shoreline, this eclectic mix of birds faces a litany of threats: overfishing, drowning in fishing lines or nets, plastic pollution, invasive species like rats in nesting areas, oil and gas development and toxic pollution moving up the food chain. And as if these weren’t enough, the double-whammy of climate change and ocean acidification threatens to flood nesting sites and disrupt food sources.

•••••

The findings are also bolstered by past research. In 2012 a paper in Bird Conservation International found that 28 percent of seabird species are threatened with extinction with 47 percent in decline. This meant, in all, seabirds were about twice as likely as land-based birds to be threatened with extinction.

•••••

Still, Paleczny and Hammil’s research arguably paints an even more alarming picture of the state of the world’s seabirds. For example, according to them, the tern family has fallen by 85%, frigatebirds by 81%, petrels and shearwaters by 79%, and albatrosses by 69%.

Such dismal findings point to one of the study’s patterns: open ocean birds – such as albatrosses, frigatebirds, petrels and shearwaters – are generally faring worse than birds that stick near the coasts.

“[Open-ocean] seabirds are hit especially hard due to their large geographic ranges. Because these species travel so far, there is a greater chance they will encounter threats,” said Hammill who noted that coastal birds “in some cases” are doing better because of improved management of breeding areas and improved fishing gear.

•••••

At the time, Boyd said their findings should result in a new campaign to save “one third for the birds” (and other marine predators) from the world’s fisheries.

But to Hammill the “most pressing issue” is plastic pollution.

Long neglected by environmentalists – perhaps due to the intractability of the problem – the issue of plastic pollution in the oceans has been slowly getting more notice. A paper released last month found that 90% of the world’s seabirds likely have plastic in their stomachs.

“I have seen everything from cigarette lighters...to bottle caps to model cars. I’ve found toys [inside seabird guts],” co-author Denise Hardesty, with CSIRO, told the Associated Press.

Seabirds continually mistake plastic for fish eggs, devouring large amounts. Plastic in animals’ stomachs not only release deadly toxins, but can also lead to slow starvation by obstructing the animals’ bowels. Birds even feed plastic bits to their young, killing their fledglings en masse.

In the end, large-scale actions to help seabirds could also go a long way in cleaning-up our increasingly trashed marine ecosystems.

•••••