Over the past few years, climate change has been linked to the mass die-offs of a variety of animal and plant populations across the planet. Warming climates disrupt ecosystems everywhere, and when that balance is thrown off, a lot of death follows. One group of researchers recently published a study of mass die-offs of puffin populations over the past five years. They noted that over that time there has been an increase in frequency of these kinds of events. The researchers noted that the dead puffins studied showed signs of starvation, and that one of the events they studied had been preceded by “shifts in zooplankton community composition and in forage fish distribution and energy density [that] were documented in the eastern Bering Sea.” In the researchers’ estimation, this links the puffin die-offs with the changing global climate and a “bottom-up shift in seabird prey availability.”
Alaska’s St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea, saw a mass die-off beginning in 2016 and lasting through 2017, with thousands of dead birds washing up onshore. Julia Parrish, a professor of ocean fishery sciences at the University of Washington, said that this die-off followed enormous dies-offs of hundreds of thousands of puffins in 2015 and 2014, telling Inside Climate News that "We've had die-offs before, but now we're seeing them every year. Altogether that's millions of birds dying. Millions."
According to the research, warmer waters in the Bering Sea have led to changes in the smallest food-chain species, an effect that works its way up the chain to the puffins, with disastrous results. Climate change is real, and it affects everyone and everything living on this planet. It should be at the top of everyone’s policy list.