Seabird responses to a changing Bering Sea

Diverging phenological responses of Arctic seabirds to an earlier spring

“…The Atlantic has also warmed in the last decades (Polyakov, Alexeev, Bhatt, Polyakova, & Zhang, ) but the spring onset proxy indicated that timing of ocean warming in the spring did not change much in the North Atlantic as compared with the North Pacific. Even if both regions experienced recent environmental changes and warming with important consequences on ecosystems (Descamps, Aars, et al, ; Kitaysky & Hunt, ), these changes likely had different patterns. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation has been mostly positive in the last 20 years while the Pacific one was strongly negative (Steinman, Mann, & Miller, ).…”

Influence of sea-ice-related features and anthropogenic subsidies on the foraging behaviour of a high-Arctic seabird, the ivory gull (Pagophila eburnea)

“…In the context of climate change, these areas may move northward, forcing the birds to switch to other foraging areas (Grémillet et al 2015) or to make longer trips, which increases the time, distance, and energetic cost of travel between foraging grounds and colonies, whereas seabirds already struggle to balance an increase in the duration of foraging trips without reducing the rate of feeding chicks (Welcker et al 2009). An unbalanced energy budget may decrease adult fitness and chick survival (Kidawa et al 2015;Kitaysky and Hunt 2018;Duffy-Anderson et al 2019). This has likely contributed to the decline observed in ivory gull colonies in south-east Greenland, Canada, and Svalbard (Strøm et al 2019).…”