Coastal seabirds have experienced die-offs in Western Alaska the past few years. Recent results from over a decade of research suggest offshore birds are also struggling with low ice and warming ocean temperatures in the Bering Sea.
Kathy Kuletz is the lead seabird biologist for Migratory Bird Management with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In a Strait Science presentation on Feb. 11, she shared research findings on birds which spend a majority of their lives at sea.
“During this warm period, there was low abundance of birds, or they shifted their distribution,” Kuletz said. “Overall, there was little reproductive success for seabirds, particularly in the northern Bering Sea.”
From 2015 to 2019, Kuletz said bird species which feed off the water’s surface fared a little better than birds that dive for their food. However, in the northern Bering Sea, groups of murres and other surface-feeding birds seemed to decrease overall, while more of the diving birds increased.
“With the fish-eating birds — the eastern murres, puffins, murres, guillemots — all combined, they show quite a dramatic shift towards lower abundance after 2014 and 2015,” she said. “On the other hand, the plankton-eaters, which are three species of auklets in this case, have increased during that period from 2015 to 2019 in the northern Bering Sea.”
Species’ distribution has also changed. Thick-billed murres, for instance, decreased in the northern Bering and southern Chukchi seas, but increased in central and northern Chukchi Sea. Meanwhile, auklets did the opposite: They decreased in the north and increased in the south.
Overall, Kuletz said every bird species responded differently to warming waters and a lack of sea ice in recent years.
“So we have some species that have declined like the common murres, some that have shifted their distribution a little bit north like the thick-billed murres,” she said. “And then [some species], like the short-tailed shearwaters here, have gone dramatically further north and concentrated in the Chukchi during these warm years.”
More long-term research is needed to understand why these changes in distribution and abundance are happening in seabirds.
One potential cause is food scarcity. Kuletz explained the zooplankton community in the northern Bering Sea was significantly lower in 2019 than 2017, according to NOAA research, and a majority were small copepods. Seabirds like auklets rely on large copepods to feed their young.
Kuletz speculates the lower abundance and quality of prey has to do with the diminishing cold pool in the Bering Sea.
“Without the ice in the Bering Sea, there was no cold pool, for the first time ever in 2018, no thermal barrier. And this resulted in a lot of very large, predatory fish coming up into the northern Bering Sea and even into the Chukchi. This was potential competition for forage fish and zooplankton,” she said. “We don’t know for sure. But there was definitely some impact.”
Looking to the near future for studying offshore birds and the permanence of these changes, Kuletz said Fish and Wildlife has partnered with United States Geological Survey for a new risk assessment. They plan on purchasing automatic identification system data from large vessels that traverse the Bering Sea.
With this data, researchers can overlay the ships’ track lines with seabird migration patterns and colonies, and ultimately understand species and areas of risk. It could also help shipping traffic avoiding high-risk areas along the way.
