The little auks that lived in the Pacific

Fossil from Japan reveals unexpected distribution of 'Atlantic' seabirds

Date: January 21, 2020

Source: Kyoto University

Findings from a 700,000-year-old fossil bone indicate that a close relative of the most abundant seabird species in the North Atlantic, the modern dovekie, or 'little auk', used to thrive in the Pacific Ocean and Japan.

Seabirds are top predators in the marine ecosystem, and their distributions are shaped by numerous environmental factors in the ocean. As such, extensive scientific inquiries have been conducted on how seabirds respond to fluctuating oceanic environments in the ecologic and geologic timescales.

"The North Pacific has been one of the most intently investigated regions, but the fossil record of seabirds in the Pleistocene Epoch, about 2.6 to 0.01 million years ago, has been scarce," explains first author Junya Watanabe of Kyoto University's School of Science. "This has led to a frustrating lack of information in this critical time period concerning the origin of modern seabird communities."

In recent years, Watanabe and his team had been investigating seabird fossils from several locations in Chiba and Tokyo prefectures, gaining new insight on the Pleistocene seabird community in the region.

The group had been successful in identifying 17 fossils representing at least 9 species of birds: three species of ducks, a loon, an albatross, a shearwater, a cormorant, an extinct penguin-like seabird called mancalline auk, and a dovekie. Most of these species can be found in the region today; however, the presence of a dovekie was completely unexpected.

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Giant Ocean Heatwave Called 'The Blob' Has Caused The Biggest Seabird Die-Off on Record

DAVID NIELD
17 JAN 2020

Scientists have reported on another devastating biological disaster, caused by a patch of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean known as 'the Blob'.

This concentrated marine heatwave lingered in the northeast Pacific between 2013 and 2016, and researchers now think it was largely responsible for the death of almost a million common murres (Uria aalge), amongst other wildlife. This makes it the largest seabird die-off in recorded history.


The estimate is based on some 62,000 murres that washed ashore on the west coast of the US during 2015 and 2016, covering an area stretching from California to Alaska. Only a fraction of birds that die at sea typically wash ashore, indicating the scale of the mass dying was much larger than the number of bodies we've found.

The emaciated birds were left starved by a lack of food, caused by increased competition in the warmer waters, according to the scientists – and numerous other species may have been hit by the same confluence of factors.

"Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often," says biologist Julia Parrish, from the University of Washington.

"We believe that the smoking gun for common murres – beyond the marine heat wave itself – was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock and Pacific cod greatly increased."

The team reviewed studies of fish and plankton collected by fisheries during the time the blob was at its peak, as well as other field studies and reports, and concluded that the warmer temperatures in the water had increased the metabolism of these cold-blooded ocean dwellers.


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Symbiotic survival of rare birds and rain forests

On the coast of Ecuador, along the Pacific Ocean, on the western side of the Andes Mountains, lies the Choco rain forest. Here, Jordan Karubian, his students and local residents, whom he’s enlisted as “environmental ambassadors,” study an endangered species of bird — the long-wattled umbrellabird.
Karubian, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Tulane University, is looking at how the long-wattled umbrellabird eats the fruits of rain forest trees and disperses their seeds. “The trees depend upon that dispersal in order to propagate and replace themselves,” says Karubian.

He is researching the mating habits, seed-dispersal activities and migratory patterns of birds in Ecuador, Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Gulf South of the United States.

The birds that Karubian studies dwell in fragile ecosystems that are in peril. And he has discovered that to have a lasting impact on protecting the birds and their habitats from disappearance, he must do more than function as a traditional researcher.
Continued: http://tulane.edu/news/newwave/092812_karubian.cfm