seabirds
Thursday Trivia: Puffins
Puffins are curious and charismatic birds that live in the North Atlantic ocean, where their orange beaks and feet make for a colorful sight.
Atlantic puffins can swim as well as fly. Like a plane taxiing for take-off, a puffin runs along the surface of the water to gather speed for flight.
Puffins spend the summer in clifftop colonies and they winter at sea. Once a year, the puffins moult, and are left temporarily flightless.
Each year, Atlantic puffins return to breeding grounds, where they perform rituals like bill-knocking and marching in front of burrows. Burrows are sometimes re-used between seasons. Each pair of Atlantic puffins incubates a single egg, and when the chick hatches, they bring it small whole fish, which they are able to carry by using their tongues to hold the fish to the roof of the beak. Chicks are fed for six weeks, then abandoned; after several days the chicks leave to hunt for themselves.
Atlantic puffins currently have large and fairly healthy populations. However, they have been targeted by human hunting for meat and feathers, and they are also vulnerable to attacks by gulls, rats, cats, dogs and foxes. One of the most important risks they face is overfishing of species like sand eel and capelin, which Atlantic puffins rely on for food. Puffins are also vulnerable to the effects of oil spills.
New Report: Small Fish in Big Trouble
Did you know that the brown pelican relies on northern anchovy for food? Or that the endangered blue whale feeds exclusively on tiny krill at rates of up to 4,000 pounds per day? Or that a record number of young sea lions were stranded on California beaches last year because they didn’t have enough small fish to eat?
Individually they don’t look like much, but small fish and invertebrates called “forage species” school up to form massive underwater bait balls.
These forage fish are the foundation of the marine food web and provide food for nearly everything else higher up the food ladder. Forage species, such as Pacific herring, Pacific sardine, anchovy, smelts, squid and krill are the critical prey for whales, dolphins, sea lions, many types of fish, and millions of seabirds.
Our new report, “Forage Fish: Feeding the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem,” shows the value of forage fish for fisheries and wildlife – and demonstrates that it’s high time that our fisheries managers recognize their big impact in the ocean.
How many forage fish are needed to feed our ocean’s wildlife and preserve the benefits forage species provide us? That is the question we are asking managers to answer and take into account when setting catch quotas.
As consumers we enjoy forage fish without even realizing it. Activities, such as whale watching, enjoying fresh wild salmon for dinner, and going sport fishing, are all possible because those top predators survive on forage fish. And they are important for the economy, too -- tourism, recreation activities, and fishing brought in over $23 billion in GDP to California, Oregon, and Washington combined in 2004 alone.
Oceana is the first conservation group to assess the current status of Pacific forage fish. Our new report details the role of forage species in the California Current marine ecosystem, the threats to forage species populations, and the flawed management structures currently in place. The report documents the large gaps in stock information and show the fisheries mismanagement taking place at multiple levels of state, federal and international government.
Providing and maintaining a healthy, sustainable ocean ecosystem does not mean shutting down existing fisheries—but it does call for change. The challenge is to extend the principles in our new report to create a new way of managing our resources that goes beyond single-species management, and considers the role of forage species within the ecosystem as a whole.
By highlighting the colossal importance of these tiny forage species, Oceana aims to ensure a healthy, diverse, productive, and resilient California Current marine ecosystem. Be sure to check out the full report and let us know what you think!
Where Are They Now?: Ocean Hero Jay Holcomb
We are now accepting nominations for our third annual Ocean Heroes Contest! Throughout the nomination period, which ends April 27, I’ll be featuring a few of the past winners and finalists to get you inspired. Last week I updated you on last year’s Junior Ocean Heroes, the Shark Finatics. Today we’re catching up with the 2010 Adult Ocean Hero, Jay Holcomb.
Jay Holcomb garnered the most votes in the Adult category last year for his quarter-century of work rehabilitating oiled seabirds around the world with the International Bird Rescue Research Center (IBRRC). In fact, when we announced his big win, Jay was on the Gulf Coast leading the effort to clean up oiled birds from the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Since then, the organization has re-grouped. They are still rescuing birds on a daily basis from their home base in California, but Jay’s role has changed. He has stepped down as executive director and colleague Paul Kelway has stepped up. Jay is now the Director Emeritus, which gives him more time to focus on his passion: saving birds.
