“One of largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded” now underway on West Coast — Gov’t: “I’ve never seen anything like this, ever” — Experts: “Just massive, massive, unprecedented” … “Strong possibility of it escalating to affect other species” — “Significant uptick in mass-mortality events in marine world”
ENENews.com
January 23rd, 2015
National Geographic, Jan 23, 2015 (emphasis added): Mass Death of Seabirds in Western U.S. Is ‘Unprecedented’… [It’s] becoming one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded… about Halloween, thousands of juvenile auklets started washing ashore… Since then the deaths haven’t stopped. Researchers are wondering if the die-off might spread to other birds or even fish. The gruesome auklet deaths come just as scientists around the globe are seeing a significant uptick in mass-mortality events in the marine world, from sea urchins to fish and birds. Although there doesn’t appear to be a link to the virus that killed tens of millions of sea stars along the same shores… some scientists suspect a factor in both cases may be uncharacteristically warm waters… At first scientists weren’t too surprised by the carcasses washing ashore… But they now are perplexed by the sheer numbers of dead birds and the spreading geographic extent of the die-off… By comparison, not one of the five largest U.S. bird mortality events tracked by USGS since 1980 is estimated to have topped 11,000 deaths. In Europe… the worst die-off on record [was] 57,000… On some beaches the Cassin’s auklet death toll was a hundred times greater than any bird die-off ever… and six times worse per kilometer than the body count recorded after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill… Research in the waters off Oregon already has shown that some of the tiny crustaceans at the bottom of the marine food chain were replaced by smaller species… It’s still not clear [if] changing climate contributed to any of these shifts.
The Rest…HERE
