More frequent El Niño events in
the future may have surprising impacts on seabirds and some fish species,
according to a study from the University of California, Davis.
El Niños are unusually warm ocean
conditions that occur every two to seven years off the Pacific Coast, bringing
with them poor ocean productivity and sometimes catastrophic weather
conditions. Fossil coral records and climate change models
indicate that El Niños occurred both more and less frequently over the past
1,000 years than they do now, and climate change may speed up or slow
down their frequency in the future.
In a modeling study recently
published in the journal Theoretical Ecology, UC Davis researchers in the
Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology wondered how changes in
frequency of El Niño and its more favorable, cool-water counterpart La Niña
might affect Brandt's cormorant. The seabird was selected as a model species
because of its known sensitivity to environmental changes.
"We expected that if you
increased the frequency of El Niños it would have a negative impact on the
population," said lead author Annie Schmidt, a Ph.D. student at UC Davis
during the time of the study and currently a researcher at the nonprofit Point
Blue Conservation Science. "It turns out it was exactly the
opposite."
Taking the good with the bad
The study's models indicated that
doubling the frequency of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon,
which includes El Niño and La Niña, unexpectedly resulted in higher population
numbers and a lower chance of extinction for Brandt's cormorants.
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