For the period of 2014 to 2016, there was a marine heat wave called the blob in the northern Pacific Ocean. It affected a lot of things and it didn't help that there was an El Nino year during that time or an El Nino cycle during that time. We haven't really quantified the effects that it had on species really until now. Studies are starting to come out saying that species such as the murre, a seabird, a very common seabird in Alaska, have had about a
half of their population die off. That's over four million individuals die off, not just because of the heat wave, but because of the effects after the heat wave, which makes it even scarier and why we should be really worried about the effects of climate change. We're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm
your host, Andrew Luan. This is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. And I have to, again, apologize for my voice. This cold does not seem to be going away. It's affecting everything I do, but, especially when I talk, and now I'm really congested, so I just wanted
to apologize for that. Anyway, This is the podcast where you find out everything about the ocean So if you want to know more about the ocean you want to know how you can protect the ocean Not only do you want to listen to this podcast, but you want to go over to our website speak up for blue.com That's speak up for blue.com you get an information episodes of our podcast a video podcast other podcasts that we have out there as well as just information on
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to hear your thoughts on that. Anyway, let's get into the episode. This is a really interesting, I'm not a seabird expert by any means, but they've always interested me in their patterns and their trends. Obviously, they really tell a story about how healthy the ocean is and how plentiful the food is in the ocean when you have a healthy population of seabirds around. And in Alaska, on the Pacific Ocean side, MERS
it pronounced MERS. It's spelt m-u-r-r-e-s It's a common seabird and they look a little bit like flying penguins their stout tuxedo style bodies dive and swim in the ocean and eat small fish and then fly back to the islands off and or coastal cliffs where they nest and large colonies But their hearty physiques disguise how vulnerable these birds are to changing ocean conditions They rely on food from the ocean. So any disruption in of the ocean and
the food supply will disrupt this population. This population, healthy-wise, back in 2008, this population in a healthy state is about 8 million individuals back in 2008 when measured. The species has been monitored from 2008 to 2020, and some studies have come out to say, hey, you know what? The species isn't doing very well. The health of the population is actually cut into half. And there's
a number of variables around that. And obviously, there's some day-to-day things, like in a regular situation, There are disruptions in the environment. There are disruptions to populations. Population can undergo small die-offs. A population can undergo changes in just like short-term disruptions, right? If something was displaced in their colony or where they go on their cliffs or in their islands, maybe that would affect their young of year for that year or their reproductive
group for that year. The babies, essentially. And then there's other times where, you know, maybe the food supply moved over a little bit and it came back the next year. So that year that they moved over, maybe the population didn't do so well. There's a lot of different things that could happen, right? We just don't know. Sometimes diseases break out in a colony and that colony can lose some individuals. It could lose
hundreds, it could lose thousands, it could lose a million or so. But the ability for that healthy population to bounce back is really what we look for in healthy populations. We have small die-offs all the time, and then their ability to come back to the right number of individuals, or come back to even more, or just a little bit less, shows the recovery of where we're at. We monitor it
just like we monitor fish. But not a lot of people eat seabirds, and that's okay, but we monitor their population on the ability to recover, ability to buffer a system as it changes through time. But over the periods of 2014 and 2016, we saw the heat wave, the blob. And this was a heat wave that was combined with a couple of El Nino years, made everything super, super warm on the sea surface temperature, and it just changed a lot of things. Some things we just don't even know how much
it changed yet, and we're just getting a little bit of an idea. So in 2020, the University of Washington led Coastal Observation and Seabird Team, also known as COASST, which is a great acronym, by the way. Scientists put up a lot of acronyms, but this was really good. It was COASST, C-O-A-S-S-T. Very good acronym. It makes sense. Everything's looking on the coast. You're doing Coastal
Observation and Seabird Survey Team. Very good. The observers first identified the massive mortality event affecting common murres along the west coast of Alaska. The study documented 62,000 carcasses, mostly in Alaska, in one year. In some places, beachings were more than a thousand times the normal rates, but the 2020 study did not estimate the total size of the die-off after the 2014 to 2016 blob event, right? That was
one of the big things. Now this was a citizen science program that the University of Washington had led and so which is basically the coastal residents search at local beaches to find dead birds and documented those dead birds which contributed to this new study and it was led by federal scientists from the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife which is kind of interesting. So the one that was published December 12th
just recently in Science, a team led by the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service analyzed years of colony-based surveys to estimate total mortality and later impacts. So the analysis of 13 colonies surveyed between 2008 and 2022 finds that the colony size of the Gulf of Alaska east of the Alaska Peninsula dropped by half after the marine heat wave. In colonies along the eastern Bering Sea, west of the peninsula, the decline was even steeper at 75% loss. So it was led
by Heather Renner, a wildlife biologist at the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service, estimates that 4 million Alaska common murres died in total, about half of the total population, and no recovery has yet to be seen. The study shows clear and surprisingly long-lasting impacts of a marine heat wave on top of marine predator species, as said by Julia Parrish, a University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and of biology, who was the co-author
of the paper, the 2020 paper and the new study. Importantly, she goes on, the effect of the heat wave wasn't via thermal stress on the birds, but rather shifts in the food web. That's in the food web, leaving murres suddenly and fatally without enough food. Here's the problem. A lot of the times, as I mentioned, usually the short-term disruptions. inevitably starving these species, right? These individuals in this population
to the point where they lose half of their population. There's no recovery yet because the food within the ocean hasn't recovered yet. When we start to see animals either shifting areas because it's too hot, And these birds haven't been able to find where this new population is. Or the population that they're feeding on, the prey, have actually just died off because it's too hot. Animals within the ocean have a certain range of heat tolerance. There are reasons why certain species are where
they are. Cold water species are in the cold because they require ranges in the cold. If it gets too hot, their bodies can't handle it. And so they either have to move to colder areas where it's more comfortable, or they end up dying off. That will affect the predator-prey relationship of these MERS seabirds. If the MERS can't find enough food, their population will die off. They will not recover until that population goes up. And we have seen this
in a lot of predator-prey relationships. We've seen that in A great analogy would be the sea otter, the kelp, as well as the sea urchins in the Pacific Ocean. With a lot of sea otters around, they keep the urchins intact. And without those sea otters, we'll see an increase in the predation of sea urchins on kelp, and we'll see a decrease in kelp habitats, right? We also see it a little bit from sea
stars when we start to see sea stars eat kelp habitats as well. This all fluctuates as each of these populations of species fluctuates. So once we start to see a reintroduction of sea otters, then the sea urchins go down a little bit and the kelp kind of come up. Of course, the abundance of the sea stars also affect the recovery of the kelp forests as well. So it all just teeter-totters based on the abundance of each of these populations of different species. And it can get quite complex.
But when an overall shift in the temperature the ocean will change the actual prey relationship right the predator prey relationship with the with losing the abundance of a Specific prey and there is no other prey to take that place Then you're gonna start to see a loss with the seabird population just as we're seeing by half and no recovery in
Place right? We haven't seen anything that's been observed If you don't remember, the warm blob was an unusually warm and long-lasting patch of surface water in the Northeast Pacific from 2014 to 2016, affecting weather and coastal marine ecosystems from California all the way to Alaska. As ocean productivity decreased, the effect of food supply on top predators, including seabirds, marine mammals, and
commercially important fish, also changed. Based on the condition of the MERS carcasses, authors of the 2020 study concluded the most likely cause of this mass mortality event was starvation. So there it is. They starve to death, unfortunately. Most of them starve to death. Obviously, this is a problem for this population. How this will affect the rest of the food web, we don't know. There's still a
lot of research that needs to be done. But it appears that an event as significant as the blob for these two years have affected the populations of a top predator within this food system, which is telling of how the food web within the ocean has changed. And we don't even know those effects yet. There's going to be more research that needs to be done to be able to see what those effects are on this food web and what those changes are. But we may have
actually passed a tipping point in our ecosystem management. And we have, like, where recovery for some of the pre-die-off abundance is not possible. Just think about that. We may be at this tipping point for this species and many others where we may not be able to have them recover. They may just be down at 4 million and maybe even lower in the future because if their prey hasn't recovered, their prey population hasn't recovered, they're not going
to recover. more and more individuals are gonna die until they can actually have enough prey to sustain that population, right? That number, that population, and we don't know what that number is. So obviously they need to do more research on what that prey population is and where it's at from its population, how that's changed, has it moved over, who knows? We don't know how it's gonna recover, but obviously monitoring and
research needs to be done. And this is why it's so important to fund research. This is why it's so important to be at a point where we can ensure that governments as well as nonprofit organizations and institutes and foundations are funding this type of research because we need to know how these changes are affecting populations around the world from top predators to the bottom of the food web and everything in between. So that's it for today's episode. I want to just thank you for listening.
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