Seabird Population Collapse On Farallons Mirrors North Sea Disaster

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Just 26 miles from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Northern California's rugged Farallon Islands are a perfect backdrop for a mystery. Home to the largest seabird colony in the continental United States with about 250,000 birds, the islands are the Manhattan of the bird world. Yet things are far from normal in this avian city: This year, the vast majority of seabirds failed to breed, or abandoned their nests. Hundreds of dead birds washed up on the California shore, and almost all of them appear to have died from starvation.

"We haven't seen this before," says Russ Bradley, a senior biologist at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, a non-profit that conducts seabird research along the California coast. "It's kind of concerning." Scientists and fishermen from Canada's Vancouver Island to Santa Barbara report similar findings and say that other species are struggling as well. Juvenile rockfish populations are the smallest in 23 years, sea lion numbers are down, and federal surveys of juvenile salmon off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia indicate as much as a 30 percent drop in population. Federal scientists report that where normally they catch several hundred salmon in the spring, this year they caught eight.

We expect scientists to make sense of odd events, but they too are puzzled. Researchers are generally a calm and cool group - I have yet to meet an "ologist" who was in the high school drama club - so it makes sense that no climatologists, oceanographers or biologists have stopped forward with a definitive answer. Here is what researchers know for sure: Winds that in normal years churn the sea, dragging cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep to the surface, were absent or weak this spring. Without such upwelling, plankton and krill, the supporters of the food web, weren't brought to the surface. As a result, fish and birds went hungry.

Another clue may lie in new studies that indicate that the oceans are warming. A 2005 report by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration indicates that in the past 50 years, the upper 10,000 feet of the world's oceans has warmed by 0.037 degrees Centigrade - a huge number, considering the volume of water involved. A study produced last month by the Canadian government found that in 2004, surface temperatures off the coast of British Columbia were the warmest in 50 years.

EDIT

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_2934353

[phantom power]

1. My dad once said...

"The earth is trying to tell us something, if only we would listen."