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6 (A) A Flesh-footed shearwater (Ardenna carneipes) fledgling (approximately 90 days old) found on Lord Howe Island, Australia, in May 2012 showing the ingested plastics in its stomach. (B) the ingested plastics from the same individual spread out in the lab. Photos courtesy of Jennifer Lavers.
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... of importance for some seabirds is how changes in the environment may lead their predators to change behaviors. For example, Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) predation on seabirds in the Arctic has increased significantly with reduced summer sea ice coverage (Iverson, Gilchrist, Smith, Gaston, & Forbes, 2014) (Fig. 7.1). How such increased predation will affect seabird populations will depend on the intensity and distribution of depredation, but the consequences may be both at the individual and population ...
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... diversity and impact of ectoparasites on seabirds is better documented. Common ectoparasites include fleas, lice, mites, and ticks ( Fig. 7.2). The overall diversity of these species on seabirds, particularly for lice and mites, is impressive and largely underestimated (Stefan, Gómez-Díaz, & Mironov, 2013). Ticks and fleas have been more readily studied, but population genetic studies have shown that these organisms repeatedly diverge into local seabird-specific populations ...
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... cholera (caused by Pasteurella multocida) has spread from poultry to wild animal populations and has recently reached as far as some Arctic wild bird populations Phillips et al., 2016). In seabirds, there has been minimal reporting of this disease except in Common Eiders (Iverson, Forbes, Simard, Soos, & Gilchrist, 2016) (Fig. 7.3), Common Murres (Uria aalge) (Österblom, Van Der Jeugd, & Olsson, 2004), Cape Cormorants (Waller & Underhill, 2007), and gulls ( Wille et al., 2016). Avian cholera can cause widespread mortality in some populations, especially when the disease is novel ) or outbreaks coincide with poor conditions (Waller & Underhill, 2007). A decrease ...
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... environments, and thus can affect seabirds at different stages of their life history (e.g., Gilliland et al., 2009;Jones et al., 2015). Today, locally harvested seabirds remain important in some regions of the world, as a subsistence harvest (as food or income), or for recreation. The Common Eider harvest by indigenous peoples in the Arctic (Fig. 7.4), the Northern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), and Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica) harvest on the Faroe Islands, and the shearwater (Ardenna spp.) and petrel (Pterodroma spp.) chick harvests in Australia and New Zealand are examples of traditional harvests, which are still important as a supplementary source of nourishment or income, ...
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... debris has increased (Thompson, 2016). First reported in fish in 1949, accounts of plastic ingestion by seabirds were not made until the 1960s (Provencher, Bond, et al., 2017). Since then, there have been hundreds of reports of seabirds ingesting plastics across the globe (Provencher, Bond, et al., 2017;Wilcox, Van Sebille, & Hardesty, 2015) (Fig. ...
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... and 1960s (Munilla, Díez, & Velando, 2007). Gillnet fisheries were among the first to be recognized as problematic for diving seabirds ( Tull et al., 1972), and the high levels of bycatch (of several taxa; Northridge, 1991) in high seas drift gillnets resulted in a global moratorium on this gear in international waters (United Nations, 1991) (Fig. 7.7). Bycatch in longline fisheries, and later trawl fisheries, was implicated in the decline of albatrosses in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Brothers, 1991;Weimerskirch, Brothers, & Jouventin, 1997) (Fig. 7.8), though greater research focus on trawl bycatch did not develop until the early 2000s (CCAMLR, 2002;Weimerskirch, Capdeville, & ...
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... Northridge, 1991) in high seas drift gillnets resulted in a global moratorium on this gear in international waters (United Nations, 1991) (Fig. 7.7). Bycatch in longline fisheries, and later trawl fisheries, was implicated in the decline of albatrosses in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Brothers, 1991;Weimerskirch, Brothers, & Jouventin, 1997) (Fig. 7.8), though greater research focus on trawl bycatch did not develop until the early 2000s (CCAMLR, 2002;Weimerskirch, Capdeville, & Duhamel, 2000). In recent years, seabird mortality in purse seine fisheries, particularly of shearwaters, has been recorded ( Oliveira et al., 2015;Suazo et al., 2014) and is receiving increased attention. ...
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... eat ~70-100 million tons (Mt) of food annually, the bulk of which is forage nekton like squid, krill, and small schooling fish (Rountos, Frisk, & Pikitch, 2015) (Fig. 7.9). Forage nekton are also targeted by industrial fisheries which catch ~20 Mt annually, or ~30% of total global landings (Nicol, Foster, & Kawaguchi, 2012). These fisheries overlap with seabirds in space, time, size-classes taken, and trophic level of catch ( Rountos et al., 2015). Consequently, most efforts to document ...
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... recent years, numerical simulations of seabird-fisheries competition have become commonplace (Sydeman et al., 2017). Models used include mass-balance models such as Ecopath and Ecopath with Ecosim ( Kaplan et al., 2013;Smith et al., 2011); bioenergetics models of prey consumption (Furness, 1978); individual-based models of foraging ecology and population dynamics (Boyd et al., 2016); system-dynamics models (Weller et al., 2016); end-to-end system models such as Atlantis (Smith et al., 2011); and ecosystem models of intermediate complexity . While specific conclusions differ, numerical simulations broadly suggest that seabirds can be affected by reductions in prey even in the absence of fishing, that modeled fisheries impacts on seabirds are small relative to natural variation ( Kaplan et al., 2013;Smith et al., 2011), but that fishing can accelerate seabird population declines Robinson et al., 2015). ...
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... is within 25 km ( Borrelle et al., 2015;Buxton et al., 2013) and that most seabirds exhibit high survival and low reproductive rates (Weimerskirch, 2002), for many species it may take many decades for a colony to develop (Kappes and Jones, 2014). Thus, active restoration is often a desired and important addition to restoration projects ( Fig. 7.10). The best known, and pioneering, active seabird restoration project is Project Puffin. Started by the National Audubon Society in 1973, its goal was to restore breeding Atlantic Puffins to Eastern Egg Rock Island in the Gulf of Maine (Kress, 1998). This work led the way in developing methods to restore seabirds to historically occupied ...
Citations
Understanding how fisheries influence seabird distribution is critical in the development of sustainable fisheries management. Species distribution models were applied to analyse the influence of the fishing footprint, discards, and oceanographic factors on seabird attendance patterns to trawlers in the Gulf of Cádiz. More than 30 species of seabirds were attracted to trawlers, although only seven were registered with relatively high frequency and abundance. For these species, fishery footprint was a good predictor for the distribution of four out of seven (yellow-legged gull, lesser black-backed gull, northern gannet, and Cory's shearwater). Yellow-legged and lesser black-backed gull flocked in large numbers to trawlers, mostly in shallow areas where they were also attracted by purse seines. Northern gannets and Cory's shearwaters appeared with relatively high frequency and their distributions correlated with trawler effort and abundance of potential prey discards. Balearic shearwaters were attracted in low numbers and concentrated in shallow areas, where potential prey discards were also more abundant. For these three species, discards as surrogate of natural prey distribution were good predictors of trawler attendance. Our research revealed that, at a local scale, the degree of interaction of seabirds on fishing discards varies by species. Therefore, fine-scale studies are essential in identifying interactions between seabirds and fisheries, and thus assessing conservation issues such as bycatch or the consequences of discard bans.
