Just 26 miles from San
Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Northern California’s rugged
Farallon Islands are a perfect backdrop for a mystery. Home to the
largest seabird colony in the continental United States with about
250,000 birds, the islands are the Manhattan of the bird world.
Yet things are far from normal in this avian city: This
year, the vast majority of seabirds failed to breed or abandoned
their nests. Hundreds of dead birds washed up on the California
shore, and almost all of them appear to have died from starvation.
“We haven’t seen this before,” says Russ Bradley, a
senior biologist at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, a nonprofit
that conducts seabird research along the California coast. “It’s
kind of concerning.”
Scientists and fishermen from
Canada’s Vancouver Island to Santa Barbara report similar
findings and say that other species are struggling as well.
Juvenile rockfish populations are the smallest in 23 years, sea
lion numbers are down, and federal surveys of juvenile salmon off
the coasts of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia indicate as
much as a 30 percent drop in population. Federal scientists report
that where normally they catch several hundred salmon in the
spring, this year they caught eight.
We expect scientists
to make sense of odd events, but they are also puzzled. Researchers
are generally a calm and cool group — I have yet to meet an
“ologist” who was in the high school drama club — so it makes
sense that no climatologists, oceanographers or biologists have
stopped forward with a definitive answer.
Here is what
researchers know for sure: Winds that in normal years churn the
sea, dragging cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep to the
surface, were absent or weak this spring. Without such upwelling,
plankton and krill, the supporters of the food web, weren’t brought
to the surface, and as a result, fish and birds went hungry.
Another clue may lie in new studies that indicate that
the oceans are warming. A 2005 report by the National Ocean and
Atmospheric Administration indicates that in the past 50 years, the
upper 10,000 feet of the world’s oceans has warmed by .037 degrees
Centigrade — a huge number, considering the volume of water
involved. A study produced last month by the Canadian government
found that in 2004, surface temperatures off the coast of British
Columbia were the warmest in 50 years.
Of course, as any
mystery fan knows, the data could be a red herring in solving the
puzzle of this year’s strange events. Coastal upwelling zones are
prone to annual temperature fluctuations, so without additional
data, scientists don’t know whether what happened this year is an
anomaly, part of a natural cycle, or an indicator of global warming
and a harbinger of more bad news to come.
This
uncertainty underscores the need to conduct more long-term surveys
and studies. The Point Reyes Bird Observatory in the Farallon
Islands has compiled some of the oldest bird data in the country,
yet it only goes back 35 years. Research needed to gather baseline
data about ocean temperatures, salinity and sea levels is unsexy
and repetitive. This is no mission to Mars or the stuff of campaign
speeches.
Yet this is exactly the science that’s critical
for changes that occur on a scale of 50-to-10O years. Currently,
the government provides most money for such research in
four-to-five year chunks, and that’s not long enough, says Jerry
Melillo, president of the Ecological Society of America.
“We’re asking about science that’s (up) to a century in
scope, but they (politicians) are living in an environment where
the next election is two years away,” he says. “It’s a mismatch
that’s really troubling.” Melillo and others say we need a stable,
long-term funding source that foregoes the politically charged
budget appropriation process.
A 2003 Pew Oceans
Commission report proposed a way to do just this, suggesting that
Congress set up a trust fund for fisheries and ocean research.
Money to fund the trust would come from a nominal user tax on all
seafood sold in the United States.
Let’s say global
warming has started to run the ecological show. If so, scientists
say its impacts will place a huge burden on generations to come.
The least we can do is provide those who come after us with the
information to make informed decisions. It may not be sexy, but
then, neither are dead birds.
Rebecca Clarren
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). She writes about
agriculture and environmental issues from Portland,
Oregon.
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