seabirds

Animals cover astonishing distances when they are looking for food. While caribou, reindeer and wolves clock up impressive mileage on land, seabirds are unrivalled in their travelling distances.Arctic terns travel from the Arctic to Antarctica and back as part of their annual migration. Wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) fly the equivalent of ten times to the Moon and back over their lifetimes.There has been a lot of research into how seabirds choose their flight paths and find food. They seem to use their sight or…

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This weekly newsletter is part of a CBC News initiative entitled "Our Changing Planet" to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday.This week:What microplastics are doing to seabirds could tell us about their effect on humansProtesting against private jetsHow to keep your pet safe from wildfire smokeWhat microplastics are doing to seabirds…

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Seabirds evolved about 60 million years ago, as Earth’s continents drifted toward their current positions and modern oceans took shape. They spread across thousands of undisturbed islands in the widening seas. And as flying dinosaurs and giant omnivorous sea reptiles died out, seabirds also started filling an ecological niche as ecosystem engineers.They distribute nutrients, in the form of guano, that’s beneficial to…

To find out if the microbes being introduced might be “good” or “bad”, Fackelmann and her colleagues analyzed the microbiomes and looked up individual types of microbes in databases to work out what they do. They found that, with more plastic, there were more microbes that are known to break down plastic to some degree. There were also more microbes that are known to be resistant to antibiotics, and with the potential to cause disease. Fackelmann and her colleagues didn’t assess the health of the birds, so they don’t…

This might be why her team got contrasting results in their analysis: The more individual microplastics in the gut, the greater the microbial diversity, but the higher mass of microplastics, the lower the diversity. The more particles a bird eats, the greater the chance that those hitchhiking microbes take hold in its gut. But if the bird has just eaten a higher mass of microplastics—fewer, but heavier pieces—it may have consumed fewer microbes from the outside world.Meanwhile, particularly jagged microplastics might be…

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?”   This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab, a group of Australian and international scientists who study plastic pollution,…

December and January represent breeding season for seabirds in Antarctica, a time when there should be thousands of active nests. But strong snowstorms during the 2021-2022 season made it difficult for birds to access their usual grounds and resulted in a total failure to reproduce for multiple species.A recent study published in the journal Current Biology found that, from December 2021 to January 2022, almost no birds nested and laid eggs. Breeding failures have happened in the past, but an almost complete failure to…

Swedish power giant Vattenfall did a two-year, €3 million study of seabirds at an offshore wind farm off Scotland – here’s what it found. The aim of the 115-page study, which took place at Vattenfall’s 11-turbine Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm, aka the European Offshore Wind Deployment Center, was: …to improve our understanding of seabird flight behavior inside an offshore wind farm. This should be achieved through collection of as detailed seabird flight data as possible rather than through…

Like big-wave surfers or daring meteorologists, shearwaters in the Sea of Japan deliberately head toward powerful (and dangerous) storms. When hurricanes strike, most birds either evacuate or take shelter. After all, these storms can cause massive avian mortality. But after analyzing wind data and GPS- tracking information from 75 streaked shearwaters, British and Japanese researchers found that the seabirds sometimes navigate toward the center of hurricanes—and remain there tailing the eye for up to eight hours. The…

It's always upsetting to see images of seabirds covered in crude oil, as the result of an accidental spill. According to a new study, however, even tiny amounts of routinely released waterborne oil may seriously damage such birds' feathers.Led by researcher Emma Murphy, a team at Ireland's University College Cork started by collecting feathers from live Manx shearwaters, which are a type of seabird believed to be threatened by oil pollution.In lab tests, the scientists proceeded to measure how quickly water would pass…