As Yosty mentioned, during the years of 2014 and 2015 scientists with Gulf Watch Alaska began to notice multiple strange occurrences happening in the Gulf, and they wondered how these could be connected.
The area of water monitored by the team of scientists at Gulf Watch Alaska is crucial for the survival of animals in and surrounding the Gulf, as well as the populations of people situated on the coast. Using the power and capabilities of the Gulf Watch Alaska team, scientists have begun to piece together the mystery of these strange events. But before figuring out how these events are connected, the scientists needed to fully understand the scope of what was happening in 2014 and 2015.
Starting in the winter of 2014, residents of communities surrounding the Gulf of Alaska were witness to a very concerning phenomenon happening to one of the area’s most familiar seabirds, the common murre.
Striking numbers of common murres were washing up dead along the coast, and thousands were traveling unusually far inland and away from their feeding grounds in the Gulf of Alaska. It is considered normal for common murre populations to intermittently experience large-scale die-offs, known as wrecks, but the series of die-offs beginning in the winter of 2014 and extending through 2016 were unparalleled in the historic record, both in terms of geographic area and length of time.
As the initial reports of these unusual common murre deaths and migratory patterns began making their way to the scientists of Gulf Watch Alaska, there was a lot of speculation about what could be causing this event. Travel with Yosty to meet Gulf Watch Alaska Scientist Kathy Kuletz to hear her account of the common murre die-off event and how her research seeks to understand what was causing the die-off.
Click the video below to hear Kathy’s experience with the common murres.
VIDEO: Kathy Kuletz and the Common Murres
Kathy Kuletz talks about common murre die-offs and their potential causes, and some of the challenges scientists face when trying to study these events. (3:45)
Narrator:The first person Yosty sat down with was Kathy Kuletz, a scientist who studies birds for Gulf Watch.
Yosty: Hi Kathy, you’ve been a wildlife biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife service since 1978?
Kathy: Yes.
Yosty: Can you tell me about what went on in 2014-2015 that was so unusual in the Gulf of Alaska?
Kathy: Everyone knows, it’s been really warm, that was the main thing. And associated with that we started having reproductive failure by seabirds and large die-off events - mainly with common murres but some other species were involved as well.
But the main event, which has been really noteworthy, has been the die-off of common murres. It has been unprecedented in its geographic scope, extending from southeast Alaska all the way up into the Aleutian Islands and Bering Sea but mainly in the Gulf, the northern Gulf of Alaska. And it’s been unprecedented in the length of time that this has continued, we started having hints of it in 2014, it really hit heavy in the winter of 2015 and 2016 and just continued in episodes, die-offs happening throughout 2016.
Yosty: So what do you think is killing the birds?
Kathy: When we find them, we have looked at some carcasses on the beach and taken some back to the labs. USGS has been working with us and many other groups - COASST and Fish & Game - and they have, the birds have been empty, their stomachs have been empty and they have lost muscle mass, they have all the evidence of sort of consuming from the inside because they are starved. I know there is a lot of concern about domoic acid and saxatoxin, which is found with paralytic shellfish poisoning, and that certainly could be there, but so far we’ve only found some of the birds have trace amounts of saxatoxin.
So the problem with determining if that has played a part is that they don’t keep food in their gut for very long, and because they are empty we haven’t been able to test the food that they have eaten. We do know that those kinds of toxins can change behavior of seabirds, and so it might have affected their ability to forage and find food, but it is also just as likely that there is not enough food or the food is of low quality in the areas where they normally feed.
Now when it is really warm, some of these fish will go very deep in the water column, so birds like black legged kittiwakes who just feed on the surface, they can’t access the fish. Murres can dive quite deep, 100 meters, so they should be able to access fish if they go deep but the fish might also have moved far offshore if it is very warm, they are looking for colder water sometimes or more food. So it is quite likely that their food wasn’t available, or it wasn’t nutritious. Often when it is very warm the zooplankton tend to be smaller and less energy dense and up the food chain the fish will be smaller and have less energy for weight, so that affects seabirds and marine mammals that feed on them.
We are continuing to collect carcasses when we find them, or people will ship them in and we’ll help get them sent to the lab. USGS now is putting together their own lab so we can do testing here in Anchorage, so that will expedite things a lot and maybe that’ll help us get better access to fresh samples that we can more accurately test for saxatoxin and other toxins.
Yosty: Thank you.
Who is watching the Blob?
Carcass (n): the full skeletal and organ remains of a dead organism
Crucial (adj): very important to the success or failure of something
Data (n): values of something measured
Domoic acid (n): an acid produced by algae that accumulates in the shellfish that consume the algae, affecting the brain and nervous system of the animals that eat the shellfish
Food chain (n): the organization of organisms in an ecosystem, describing which organisms eat which
Intermittently (adv): happening in an irregular pattern
Phenomenon (n): a situation that is observed for which the cause is unknown or questioned
Saxatoxin (n): a toxin produced by algae that accumulates in the shellfish that consume the algae, causing illness in the animals that eat the shellfish
Speculation (n): a theory or idea without evidence to support it
Unparalleled (adj): having no equal or match, something that is unique
Unprecedented (adj): never seen or experienced before
Wrecks (n): large die-offs of common murres that have happened periodically throughout history
