Date: April 25, 2018
Source: American Ornithological Society Publications
Office
Summary:
Where do seabirds go when their
nesting colony is buried by a volcano? In 2008, the eruption of the Kasatochi
volcano in the Aleutian archipelago provided a rare opportunity to track how
the island's Crested and Least auklet populations responded when their nesting
colony was abruptly destroyed. As a new study from The Auk: Ornithological
Advances shows, the birds were surprisingly adaptable, establishing a new
colony on freshly created habitat nearby in only four years.
Crested and Least auklets rely on
habitat that must be maintained by continual disturbance -- they nest in
crevices in talus slopes formed by rock falls, which eventually become unusable
when they're filled in with soil and debris. The volcano's 2008 eruption buried
all of the suitable nesting habitat for the 100,000 Crested Auklets and 150,000
Least Auklets that had been nesting on Kasatochi.
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