Page 28 - ARUBA TODAY

A28 SCIENCE
Friday 24 January 2020
Researchers tie massive Pacific seabird die-off to heat wave

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) and that carried ramifica-
— Common murres look tions for reproduction. Thir-
like skinny penguins but fly teen murre colonies in the
like F-15 fighter jets. Gulf of Alaska and the Ber-
The North Pacific seabirds ing Sea, where thousands
can quickly cover hun- of murres gather to repro-
dreds of miles searching duce, experienced com-
for schools of small forage plete failures for at least
fish. Their powerful wings one breeding season dur-
let them dive more than ing or after the die-off.
150 feet (46 meters) under Seabird experts early on
water to gorge on capelin, suspected naturally occur-
sand lance, herring, sardine ring toxins played a role in
and juvenile pollock. the deaths. So far, there
So biologists were stunned has been no evidence that
four winters ago when car- anything other than starva-
casses of emaciated com- tion could explain the mass
mon murres showed up on mortality, Piatt said.
beaches in what they say Pulling together work done
was the largest seabird die- by oceanographers, fishery
off recorded in the world’s and avian disease experts
oceans. The die-off even- and data collected by citi-
tually killed an estimated In this Jan. 7, 2016 file photo, dead common murres lie washed up on a rocky beach in Whittier, zen scientists, Piatt and his
500,000 to 1 million murres Alaska. collaborators focused on
from California to Alaska, Associated Press effects of the marine heat
eliminating 10-20% of the wave.
northeast Pacific popula- increased the metabolism Murre die-offs have oc- tists counted or collected The Blob created water with
tion of the species. Seabird of large fish such as Pacific curred before but never in 62,000 carcasses, although surface temperatures that
experts now believe they cod, walleye pollock and such numbers and never Piatt says the figure repre- were more than 4 degrees
know why. arrowtooth flounder, re- across three ecosystems, sents only a fraction of the (2 degrees Celsius) above
Common murres were am- quiring them to eat more Piatt said, alluding to the deaths because murres normal. The heat wave ex-
bushed by effects of the forage fish. California Current System, spend most of their time far tended hundreds of miles
northeast Pacific marine That translated into a dou- the Gulf of Alaska and the from shore. (kilometers) off shore and
heatwave dubbed “The ble whammy for murres, Bering Sea. Biologists with About two-thirds of the hundreds of feet (meters)
Blob,” according to a pa- according to the research- help from citizen scien- dead birds were adults — below the surface.q
per published Wednesday ers. The seabirds found that
by 23 federal, university their main food source had
and private researchers in a fraction of its usual nu- Ancient voice: Scientists recreate
the science journal PLOS trition. Murres also found
ONE. The heatwave lasted themselves out-competed sound of Egyptian mummy
more than 700 days from by large fish.
2014 to 2016, increasing “The food just wasn’t there
water temperature and in- and everybody wanted it,” BERLIN (AP) — Researchers mummified body the re- who specializes in thorax
terrupting patterns in the said lead author John Pi- say they've mimicked the searchers worked with, be- reconstruction and wasn't
food web from the smallest att, a research biologist for voice of a 3,000-year-old cause the tongue has lost involved in the study, ex-
creatures to top predators. the U.S. Geological Survey Egyptian mummy by rec- much of its bulk over three pressed skepticism. Even
Forage fish — the main prey who has studied seabird for reating much of its vocal millennia. cutting-edge medicine
of murres— feed on zoo- more than 40 years. “And it tract using medical scan- "We have made a faith- struggles to give living peo-
plankton, the floating small just got scarcer and scarc- ners, 3D printing and an ful sound for his tract in its ple without a thorax a "nor-
animals that feed on plant er.” electronic larynx. current position, but we mal" voice, he said.
plankton. Cold water pro- Common murres have In a paper published Thurs- would not expect an ex- Co-author John Schofield,
duces the biggest, fattiest marvelous tools for finding day by the journal Scientific act speech match given an archaeologist at the
varieties of zooplankton. forage fish but have an Reports, the authors say the his tongue state," said co- University of York, said the
But the marine heatwave Achille’s heel: Murres must technique allowed them to author David M. Howard technique could be used
reduced the nutritional eat 56% of their body mass produce a single sound - of London's Royal Holloway to help people interpret his-
value of zooplankton, re- every day, the equivalent somewhere between the college. torical heritage.
searchers concluded, and of 60 to 120 finger-length vowels in 'bed' and 'bad.' The model alone also isn't "When visitors encounter
the lower-grade food stunt- forage fish. If they don’t, The eerie tone is unlikely enough to synthesize whole the past, it is usually a visual
ed the growth of forage they can starve in three to to be a precise reflection words or sentences, the au- encounter," said Schofield.
fish. In turn, warmer water five days, Piatt said. of the speech of Egyptian thors said, noting that this "With this voice we can
priest Nesyamun, whose would require the ability to change that, and make
calculate the audio output the encounter more multi-
from the vocal tract as its dimensional."
shape is being changed. "There is nothing more
"But this is something that is personal than someone's
being worked on, so it will voice, so we think that
be possible one day," said hearing a voice from so
Howard. long ago will be an unfor-
Rudolf Hagen, an ear, gettable experience, mak-
nose and throat expert ing heritage places like Kar-
at the University Hospital nak, Nesyamun's temple,
in Wuerzburg, Germany, come alive," he said.q