The first was the feathered bodies Alaskan . They were murres, sleek black-and-white seabirds that typically spend months at a time away from land. But in 2015 and 2016, 62,000 emaciated corpses from to Alaska.
Since then, scientists have been what happened to the birds, along with other in the northeast Pacific that suddenly died or . It that the was a -breaking , a mass of warm water that would come to be known as the Blob. New findings on its on murres, published on Thursday in the Science, are a of the in a warming world.
About of Alaska’s murres, some four birds, died as a of the marine , the scientists . They believe it is the largest die-off of a of birds or mammals. The state is home to about a quarter of the world’s murres, scientists say.
Murres were the of a domino of oceanic changes to the warm water, according to a growing body of . It marine life from plankton to humpback whales. Critically for the murres, it to a in the fish they on.
One of the most in the new study is that the birds have not begun to .
“If the are good, I think there’s hope,” Ms. Renner said. “Our is that events like this are to much more , and we haven’t seen any of at all yet, eight years after the event.”
For decades, the world’s have more than 90 of the excess as humans fuels and ecosystems like . That has coral reefs, kelp and other marine ecosystems. Last year and into this year, the ’s temperature .
For the murres, earlier estimates from the Blob were . In 2020, a team of some of the same scientists estimated that a to a of the birds had died in Alaska. But the new a different and far more reliable , earlier data to before and after counts at 13 colonies throughout the Gulf of Alaska and the Eastern Bering Sea. The then those across the .
“We saw exactly the same really signal at every colony,” Ms. Renner said. “It wasn’t some of them, it was all of them.”
Avian flu has had huge on some bird the world, but have not seen much in Alaska, Ms. Renner said, so it does not appear to be a role.
, while were by the Pacific marine , some fisheries , not all showed . That the changes “pinch points” in the food rather than, say, all .
Mark Mallory, a seabird biologist and professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who was not with the study, said the the of -term data in allowing scientists to the changes on Earth.
The finding that murres, a , are not regaining their numbers, him of what happened when people overfished cod off Newfoundland, which had once been .
“Here we are decades after that event, and that marine ecosystem has not ,” Dr. Mallory said. “It’s to me that we are witnessing the early of a , by a different catastrophe, in these Alaskan waters.”