Bring back seabirds, save the climate

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This story originally appeared in Internal Weather News and is part of climatic table collaboration.

Seabirds evolved about 60 million years ago, when Earth’s continents shifted toward their current positions and the modern oceans formed. They spread over thousands of virgin islands in ever-widening seas. And as flying dinosaurs and giant omnivorous marine reptiles disappeared, seabirds also began to fill an ecological niche as ecosystem engineers.

They deliver nutrients, in the form of guano, that are beneficial to plankton, sea grasses, and coral reefs, which, in turn, nourish populations of fish that are eaten by marine birds and mammals in a cycle that forms a biological pump. carbon. The stronger the pump, the more carbon dioxide pushes into seafloor sediment storage.

Seabird colonies of almost unimaginable size likely persisted through eons of profound climate change and the geological upheavals of colliding continents, playing an important role in the ocean carbon cycle. But even its most remote island kingdoms have been quickly decimated by humans who have colonized and industrialized the planet over the past 200 years.

By some estimates, the overall world population of seabirds has been reduced by as much as 90 percent during that time, with declines of 70 percent only since 1950. Seabirds are the most threatened group of birds and one of the most threatened groups of species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Of the 346 species of seabirds, 97 are globally threatened and another 35 are listed as near threatened. Nearly half of all seabird species are known or suspected to be experiencing population declines.

Most of the damage has been caused by invading predators: humans themselves and the rats, cats, dogs, and pigs they brought along as they blew up island after island. After millions of years of evolution without predators, the birds did not recognize the new species as threats. They were particularly vulnerable because they don’t breed as prolifically as many land birds and spend a lot of time feeding their flightless young on the ground.

There was also direct human predation on an industrial scale, with seabird eggs harvested for food, their guano as fertilizer, and the birds themselves for oil—along with seals, sea lions, and whales—or as unwanted bycatch from fishing boats. commercial fishing. On the Farallon Islands near San Francisco, home to the largest seabird nesting colony in the United States, the murre population dropped from 400,000 to 60,000 in just a few decades during the gold rush, as people harvest up to half a million eggs per year.

Today, the Farallon Islands are protected as part of a marine sanctuary and nesting seabird colonies are recovering, helping to maintain the surrounding marine ecosystem, including great white sharks, top predators that sometimes feed of the population of northern sea lions that have returned to the islands since they were protected. Rhinoceros auks, related to puffins, and more than 20 threatened and endangered species have also returned:birds, reptiles, insects, marine mammals and even sea turtles—Living in and around the islands.

The return has already begun

And there are hundreds of other seabird restoration projects around the world showing signs of success, he said. Dena Spatza scientist with Pacific Rim Conservation, a non-profit organization that focuses on ecosystem repair. Spatz was lead author of an April 10 study in it Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that data collected of 851 restoration projects in 36 countries targeting 138 species of seabirds over the past 70 years.

The new study focused on efforts to actively recover bird populations, including methods of social attraction, such as the use of decoys, as well as direct translocation of young birds to new sites free of invasive predators. In more than 75 percent of the restorations, the selected species visited the sites and began breeding within two years.