On 1 January 2016 and 2 January 2016, 6,540 common murre carcasses were found washed ashore near Whitter, Alaska, translating into about 8,000 bodies per mile of shoreline — one of the highest beaching rates recorded during the mass mortality event. Photo: David B. Irons
On 1 January 2016 and 2 January 2016, 6,540 common murre carcasses were found washed ashore near Whitter, Alaska, translating into about 8,000 bodies per mile of shoreline — one of the highest beaching rates recorded during the mass mortality event. Photo: David B. Irons

By Michelle Ma
15 January 2020

(UW News) – The common murre is a self-sufficient, resilient bird.

Though the seabird must eat about half of its body weight in prey each day, common murres are experts at catching the small “forage fish” they need to survive. Herring, sardines, anchovies and even juvenile salmon are no match for a hungry murre.

So when nearly one million common murres died at sea and washed ashore from California to Alaska in 2015 and 2016, it was unprecedented — both for murres, and across all bird species worldwide. Scientists from the University of Washington, the U.S. Geological Survey and others blame an unexpected squeeze on the ecosystem’s food supply, brought on by a severe and long-lasting marine heat wave known as “the blob.”

Their findings were published 15 January 2020 in the journal PLOS ONE.

“Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often,” explained second author Julia Parrish, a UW professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “We believe that the smoking gun for common murres — beyond the marine heat wave itself — was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock and Pacific cod greatly increased.”

Common murres washing up dead on beaches in the Homer, Alaska, area were so abundant in early 2016 that Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) beach surveyors were forced to collect and photograph them in batches. Photo: COASST
Common murres washing up dead on beaches in the Homer, Alaska, area were so abundant in early 2016 that Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) beach surveyors were forced to collect and photograph them in batches. Photo: COASST

Common murres nest in colonies along cliffs and rocky ledges overlooking the ocean. The adult birds, about one foot in length, are mostly black with white bellies, and can dive more than two football fields below the ocean’s surface in search of prey.

Warmer surface water temperatures off the Pacific coast — a phenomenon known as “the blob” — first occurred in the fall and winter of 2013, and persisted through 2014 and 2015. Warming increased with the arrival of a powerful El Niño in 2015-2016. A number of other species experienced mass die-offs during this period, including tufted puffinsCassin’s auklets, sea lions and baleen whales. But the common murre die-off was by far the largest any way you measure it.

From May 2015 to April 2016, about 62,000 murre carcasses were found on beaches from central California north through Alaska. Citizen scientists in Alaska monitoring long-term sites counted numbers that reached 1,000 times more than normal for their beaches. Scientists estimate that the actual number of deaths was likely close to one million, since only a fraction of birds that die will wash to shore, and only a fraction of those will be in places that people can access.

Many of the birds that died were breeding-age adults. With massive shifts in food availability, murre breeding colonies across the entire region failed to produce chicks for the years during and after the marine heat wave event, the authors found.

“The magnitude and scale of this failure has no precedent,” said lead author John Piatt, a research biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center and an affiliate professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “It was astonishing and alarming, and a red-flag warning about the tremendous impact sustained ocean warming can have on the marine ecosystem.”

A recently dead common murre found by a citizen scientist on a routine monthly survey in January 2016. An intact, fresh bird indicates scavengers have not yet arrived. This carcass has probably only been on the beach a few hours. Photo: COASST
A recently dead common murre found by a citizen scientist on a routine monthly survey in January 2016. An intact, fresh bird indicates scavengers have not yet arrived. This carcass has probably only been on the beach a few hours. Photo: COASST

From a review of fisheries studies conducted during the heat wave period, the research team concluded that persistent warm ocean temperatures associated with “the blob” increased the metabolism of cold-blooded organisms from zooplankton and small forage fish up through larger predatory fish like salmon and pollock. With predatory fish eating more than usual, the demand for food at the top of the food chain was unsustainable. As a result, the once-plentiful schools of forage fish that murres rely on became harder to find.

“Food demands of large commercial groundfish like cod, pollock, halibut and hake were predicted to increase dramatically with the level of warming observed with the blob, and since they eat many of the same prey as murres, this competition likely compounded the food supply problem for murres, leading to mass mortality events from starvation,” Piatt said.

As the largest mass die-off of seabirds in recorded history, the common murre event may help explain the other die-offs that occurred during the northeast Pacific marine heat wave, and also serve as a warning for what could happen during future marine heat waves, the authors said.

UW scientists recently identified another marine heatwave forming off the Washington coast and up into the Gulf of Alaska.

“All of this — as with the Cassin’s auklet mass mortality and the tufted puffin mass mortality — demonstrates that a warmer ocean world is a very different environment and a very different coastal ecosystem for many marine species,” said Parrish, who is also the executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, known as COASST. “Seabirds, as highly visible members of that system, are bellwethers of that change.”

Additional UW co-authors are Timothy Jones, Hillary Burgess and Jackie Lindsey. Other study co-authors are from U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Farallon Institute, International Bird Rescue, Humboldt State University, National Park Service, NOAA Fisheries, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, NOAA Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and Point Blue Conservation Science.

This research was funded by the USGS Ecosystems Mission Area, the North Pacific Research Board, The National Science Foundation and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

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‘The blob,’ food supply squeeze to blame for largest seabird die-off


Map showing numbers of dead or moribund common murres observed on beaches that were surveyed systematically (gold circles; ~monthly) and with opportunistic beach surveys and rehab captures (red circles). Areas in which zero dead murres were encountered during surveys are indicated by white circles. All remaining coastlines (without any circles) were not surveyed. Note the California Current System is divided roughly into 3 sections: north (nCCS), central (cCCs) and south (sCCS). Graphic: Piatt, et al., 2020 / PLOS ONE
Map showing numbers of dead or moribund common murres observed on beaches that were surveyed systematically (gold circles; ~monthly) and with opportunistic beach surveys and rehab captures (red circles). Areas in which zero dead murres were encountered during surveys are indicated by white circles. All remaining coastlines (without any circles) were not surveyed. Note the California Current System is divided roughly into 3 sections: north (nCCS), central (cCCs) and south (sCCS). Graphic: Piatt, et al., 2020 / PLOS ONE

Extreme mortality and reproductive failure of common murres resulting from the northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016

ABSTRACT: About 62,000 dead or dying common murres (Uria aalge), the trophically dominant fish-eating seabird of the North Pacific, washed ashore between summer 2015 and spring 2016 on beaches from California to Alaska. Most birds were severely emaciated and, so far, no evidence for anything other than starvation was found to explain this mass mortality. Three-quarters of murres were found in the Gulf of Alaska and the remainder along the West Coast. Studies show that only a fraction of birds that die at sea typically wash ashore, and we estimate that total mortality approached 1 million birds. About two-thirds of murres killed were adults, a substantial blow to breeding populations. Additionally, 22 complete reproductive failures were observed at multiple colonies region-wide during (2015) and after (2016–2017) the mass mortality event. Die-offs and breeding failures occur sporadically in murres, but the magnitude, duration and spatial extent of this die-off, associated with multi-colony and multi-year reproductive failures, is unprecedented and astonishing. These events co-occurred with the most powerful marine heatwave on record that persisted through 2014–2016 and created an enormous volume of ocean water (the “Blob”) from California to Alaska with temperatures that exceeded average by 2–3 standard deviations. Other studies indicate that this prolonged heatwave reduced phytoplankton biomass and restructured zooplankton communities in favor of lower-calorie species, while it simultaneously increased metabolically driven food demands of ectothermic forage fish. In response, forage fish quality and quantity diminished. Similarly, large ectothermic groundfish were thought to have increased their demand for forage fish, resulting in greater top-predator demands for diminished forage fish resources. We hypothesize that these bottom-up and top-down forces created an “ectothermic vise” on forage species leading to their system-wide scarcity and resulting in mass mortality of murres and many other fish, bird and mammal species in the region during 2014–2017.

Extreme mortality and reproductive failure of common murres resulting from the northeast Pacific marine heatwave of 2014-2016