Welcome, everyone.
We're pleased to have you join us for the view from Destruction,
one Island, Twelve Thousands Birds or so, and the Futures.
using the Office of National Marine Sanctuary's Webinar Series platform. I'd like to start with
an acknowledgement that we are broadcasting from the traditional lands of the Lower Elwha Klallam
tribe and near the site of their historical village to č̕ixʷícən (Tse-whit-zen), the
Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe as a sovereign federally
recognized Indian Nation with its own constitution and government.
The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe resides in the Lower Elwha River Valley and Adjacent Bluffs
on the North Coast of the Olympic Peninsula and just west of Port Angeles, Washington.
This tribe has lived in this area since time immemorial. And today,
tribal lands include about one thousand acres of land on or near the river, where they continue
to be active in stewardship, that excuse me, protects, enhances and restores land, air,
and water resources and environmental health for generations to come. And
I hope you'll join me in supporting their efforts and successes to meet these goals.
So my name is Chris Butler Minor. And I'm the Community Engagement Specialist for
Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. And I'll be facilitating today's webinar.
Then also joining us is Grant Gollehon, that I may have said that correctly or may not have,
so, sorry if I did not, who is the Education and Outreach Assistant. He's
a Washington Conservation Corps member serving at Feiro Marine Life Center.
This event is co-hosted by Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and Feiro Marine
Life Center as the third installment of our 2023 speaker series and the speaker
series is designed to bring you marine focused topics of interest from subject matter experts.
During the presentation, all attendees will be in listen only mode, and we'll
have time to answer questions at the end of the presentation. But you're welcome to type
your questions into the question box, which is on the right hand side of your screen,
and you can also use the question box to let us know if you're having any technical issues.
We'll be monitoring those incoming questions, and we'll respond to them as quickly as we can.
Just as a reminder, we are recording this session,
and we'll share the recording with registered participants via email, And it will also be
posted on the Office of National Sanctuaries Website, along with closed captioning.
Also, after the session, we'll greatly appreciate any feedback that you might
have for us that will help us improve the experience. So please
take a few moments to complete a short evaluation following the presentation.
So I'd like to begin with a brief introduction to the National Marine Sanctuary System,
if you're not familiar with it. It is, over 50 years ago the US.
ushered in a new era of ocean conservation, excuse me, by creating the National Marine
Sanctuary System. And NOAA's Office of National Sanctuary serves as the trustee for a network of
underwater areas, encompassing more than 620,000 square miles of marine and Great Lake waters.
And as you can see from the map, excuse me, sanctuary is located all around US shorelines and
coasts. From Stellwagen Bank in Massachusetts down to American Samoa way down south in the Pacific.
And the sanctuary that I work for, Olympic coast, is located along the coast of Washington State,
and is within the usual and accustomed fishing and hunting areas of the
Hoh Tribe, Makah Tribe, Quileute Tribe, and the Quinault Indian Nation.
And this webinar series, sponsored by the National Marine Sanctuary System,
provides formal and informal educators with educational and scientific expertise,
resources, and training to help support ocean literacy.
Then I just want to give some specific information about Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
As I mentioned, it's located off the outer coast of Washington state and stretching from the north,
just west of Neah Bay, southward, all the way to the mouth of the Copalis River.
The sanctuary boundaries go out from the shoreline westward, about 45 miles in
the north and then, come in to about 25 miles off the coastline and follows the continental shelf,
southward. And most of the sanctuary waters are covering or depths of 200 meters or less, but
some of the deep Submarine Canyons can be more than 1500 meters or about 5000 feet deep.
And the sanctuary covers an area that's more than twice the size of Olympic National Park, and
it's approximately 1.7 times larger than Puget Sound.
It was established in 1994.
Because it's home to one of North America's most productive marine ecoregions, It protects an
upwelling zone. That is, seasonal hosts are home to marine mammals and seabirds. Lots of them.
And along its shores are thriving kelp and intertidal communities,
deep sea and there are deep
sea corals that are scattered on the deep sea floor. And sponges that form habitat for fishes
and other important marine wildlife, and also because of the significant natural and cultural
resources found along this spectacular, largely undeveloped coast coastline which represent some
of the last remaining wilderness coastline in the lower 48 states.
So now I'd like to turn the mic over to Grant and let him introduce Feiro Marine Life Center.
[Grant] Hi there. Thank you, Chris, for that,
and thank you everybody, for joining us tonight.
I'm Grant Gollehon. I'm the Education and Outreach Assistant at Feiro Marine Life Center.
We are a non-profit community aquarium located in Port Angeles, Washington.
In 1981 were founded by a community leader and educator,
Arthur Feiro. Our Mission at Feiro is to connect the community and the environment by
providing local, marine and watershed learning experiences and increasing the awareness of how
closely connected and interdependent we are.
Would you like me to introduce our special guest tonight, Chris? Perfect.
So it's my pleasure to introduce you guys to Eric Wagner.
Eric Wagner, is a researcher at the Center for Ecosystem's Sentinels at the University of
Washington, where he also completed his PHD in Biology.
He studies Magellanic penguins at their colony at Punta Tombo, Argentina and closer to home
rhinoceros auklet colonies in Washington. In addition to his research, he writes about science,
animals, and the environment. His essays and
journalism has appeared in the Atlantic, Audubon, Orion and The
High Country News, ecology recovery of I'm sorry.
High Country News and is also the author of three books including the most recent After the
Blast: The Ecology of Recovery of Mount Saint Helens. He currently lives in, Seattle is his
family. So without further ado I'd like to introduce Eric Wagner.
[Eric] Hi everyone. Thanks Grant for that introduction and thanks.
Thank you all for having me. This is really exciting.
Great. OK, so yeah, Tonight, I'm going to talk. The title for my talk was, originally, as sort of
alluded to the View from Destruction, One Island, 12,000 birds or so, and the Futures of the North
Pacific. But I realized as I was sort of putting it together, that, that
wasn't quite accurate. So I'm doing a bit of a bait and
switch. So instead of the View from Destruction, it is actually A Tale of
Two Islands. The Lives and Times of Rhinoceros Auklets in the California Current and the Salish
Sea. So I hope you'll forgive me for this, but really,
you could think of it as kind of two islands for the price of one, and way, way more auklets.
So, there's that.
I also want to give a thank you and talk about basically, also say that I've worked with several
other folks. I think one of whom you just heard from, Scott Person with the Washington
Department of Fish and Wildlife, Tom Good at NOAA, and Peter Hodum them at the University
of Puget Sound. And they've actually been working at these places a lot longer than I have, and
so none of us, I mean, none of the things that I'm going to talk about
are mine alone. I just want to make that very, very clear.
So what am I going to talk about? Tonight I'm going to talk about two things.
This sort of has, its a two part-er, a two part story, The first part is
going to be on the blob, or an unexpected tale of climate resilience.
The second thing I'm going to talk to you about is the unusual mortality event or a postmodern
climate mystery, and all of this sort of stems from long term monitoring
work that has been going on at both of these islands.
So let's get started on the blob, or an Unexpected Tail
of Climate Resilience. So perhaps you remember the blob. This is an image,
a NOAA image actually from sea surface temperature anomalies.
The blob that lasted, it was this huge, massive, unusually warm water that formed off the, in the,
in the northeast Pacific in 2014. And it lasted for three years: 2014 through 2016.
Was the longest
three years, the highest temperatures, over a three year period in sort of recorded
memory. And in 2015, as you can see here, it was so, basically, this is huge,
you know, this big patch of warm water formed at the surface and it just kinda stayed there
throughout the year it just didn't dissipate as people were expecting or as typically happens.
And so, to give you a sense of kind of how the blob works, this is a table of marine
heatwaves.
The blog was a, it's sort of name in sciences,
the north-east Pacific Marine Heatwaves. And Marine Heatwaves are becoming quite a thing.
As you know, they happen all over the world. You can see on this table from a paper that, you
know, there are some in the Mediterranean Sea. They've been going on since
1999. There are some big, famous ones down in Australia, around Australia, Tasman Sea and the
Great Barrier Reef, off of California. And you can see that there are levels of categories of
heatwaves, so, you know, moderate to strong, severe to extreme.
And so the blob was a category three,
severe marine heat wave. And if you look at this table,
you can look at just sort of different characteristics of it, like its
duration. It was really, really long. It was 711 days. And then it shows different amounts of time
that it spent in different states. So for some time it was moderate,
for some time it was strong, for some time it was severe.
And that's kind of an important point about marine heatwaves is that they are classed or
categorized by their highest state.
So, even though the blob was mostly in the moderate to severe or to strong phases because it
spent some time in the severe phase, as you can see here,
you can see kind of down there in the lower right, In the kind of peaks and valleys. It
was in the winter, actually, when it was hottest when it was most anomalously warm.
And so, these are sort of interesting points of blob mechanics or heat wave mechanics. As you
know, these are really sort of diverse phenomena and
people are still, are still figuring out how to describe them, how to figure out how their effects
kind of ripple through food webs and marine systems.
But, the blob's effects are super pronounced in a lot of different ways. So, one of them is there
was a huge common murre die off in the Gulf of Alaska that starved , I
think it was 2015, 2016, just tens of thousands of murre’s starved after they finished
breeding. And they found, I think they were, they counted over 60,000. I believe 62,000 that had
washed ashore along the Alaskan coastline. And from this,
they inferred that hundreds of thousands of murre’s had died.
So, another blob sort of, event, was this, because our little Cassin's auklet lined
up on the beach.
And in 2014 and 2015, there was a massive Cassin's auklet die off, off the north coast, or the
west coast of North America. And it was estimated that about 10% of the global population, I
think, of Cassin's auklets died off with this single event.
And it was not just birds that were affected by the blob, either.
In 20 15 and 2016, there was an unusual mortality event of gray whales that, there's actually kind
of one ongoing. You’ve probably heard about how many Gray Whales, dead Gray whales began
to wash ashore at beaches all up and down Oregon and Washington,
in British Columbia, Canada and Alaska, and also down sometimes in Mexico.
This particular whale here was one that washed ashore on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
And so the Blob ended officially, in 2016, it was after, that, that marine conditions began to go
back to normal, but its effects persisted. This is a graph from a paper that, as you can see, was
that ecosystem response persists after prolonged
Marine Heatwaves, and the marine heatwave that this paper was about was the blob.
And these metrics that they're looking at, you can see, you know, range from forage fish, birds
and mammals. Birds at sea along the shoreline, groundfish and Commercial harvest. And you can
see here the sort of gray patch through each one of those graphs is it's sort of a blob years.
And you see this flip, you know, of some things that were high that suddenly become low, some
things that were low that suddenly become high and they stay that way. You know, you can tell
by the end of the graphs that these figures in 2018 that things are may be starting to kind of
creep back to what they had been before. But the point is that, you know, once you get this huge
shock to an ecosystem, it doesn't just sort of go away.
It doesn't like you're turning on a switch or turning off a switch. It's more like you dial it
up. And then you slowly dial it back maybe, maybe you don't, maybe some of these, these effects that
come from marine heatwaves are very persistent.
But there was one particular species rather near and dear to our hearts, to my heart and the hearts
of my colleagues, that we wanted to look at and how it responded blob,
and that was the Rhinoceros auklet.
This is a picture of a Rhinoceros auklet. It's a
large, it's alcid a or an auk, a close relative of a puffin,
which I think of it, the Tufted puffins, which I think you just met, perhaps,
at your last seminar. It is a bit, you know,
I think it's just as fascinating, but you can see it's a little bit more of a study
of grays and curious features: the tufts around or the brows and mutton chop whiskers. It grows a
little horn during the breeding season. That falls off when it's done.
And the auklet, the neat thing about the auklet is that there's
a really good size breeding population in Washington.
And often, I mean you can see it around not just in the summer, but sometimes if you live in
Puget Sound, if you look, or if you happen to be riding the ferry, like in Seattle, I sometimes see
them at Discovery Park, just kinda hanging out a little bit off shore up the point there.
So there are two colonies that we have been looking at for many years since the early two
thousands. One is Destruction Island, which I believe is probably within your National Marine
Sanctuary. And the other is Protection Island, which is in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
The neat thing about these two islands is that, even though they're very close to each other,
they're subject to distinct, sort of, marine, physical, what we would say, physical forcing
mechanism. Where Destruction Island, being on the outer coast is much more - it sits within
this California Current, large marine ecosystem.
And Protection Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca is more sort of Salish Sea, ocean graphically
influenced, I guess you could say, although, I mean, obviously, that the California Current has a
strong influence on what happens in the Salish Sea.
Now I want to kind of give you a quick tour of the islands that we work out from a human
perspective.
Well a human and an auklet.
So this is a view of Destruction Island on an uncharacteristically clear,
summer day. Destruction a few miles off the coast.
To be there you sort of feel this pleasing sense of remoteness. You
know the only way to get there is to take a boat from La Push. It's about an hour, it's about 17
miles south of La Push. It's an old Coast Guard station or, you know, that's why it has a
lighthouse, but it has a long history among the Coast
Salish peoples, Quinault it's sort of within old Quinault territory. Present actually Quinault
territorial waters and Quinaults and Quileutes would use it as a place to hunt seals. Sometimes they
would hunt whales and they would even hunt auklets from time to time.
And the auklets show up at Destruction in April, they start to kind of prospect, and they lay a
single egg in early May. And so you may be looking at this, and you think, well,
where are the auklets?
And so the place to find an auklet is in the trees. Those are some willows, growing up,
the sandy bluffs.
This is what it looks like if you actually dare to go into those, those tree choked areas. It's quite
thick. It's you know, it's not easy to move around in.
The ground is pretty loose. The soils are pretty loose and you kind of scrambling
everywhere. And the auklets what they do is they nest in
these burrows. And so here's one here, here's one here that you can kind of see. There might be
one under there, and over here, and this, on the right side, you can see there's one kind of tucked
in there. There's one over there, one here and one up here
just out of frame. So, the auklets you know at the, they are furtive creatures. They are,
you don't really see them much during the day. But if you
go on to Destruction, you can kind of see the evidence of them, you can see where they might be.
And this is Protection. Protection is a lot bigger than Destruction, and it has a lot more
auklets. So Destruction has the latest, or the most recent estimate, has them having about 6,500
breeding pairs, so about 13,000 or so.
Give or take, Protection has about 36,000 breeding pairs, so over 70,000 auklets might be there
during the breeding season. And the islands themselves are quite different as habitat types.
Excuse me. Protection is not as tree covered, as Destruction is. And so you might ask, well,
where the auklets, well here the auklets are in the grass.
If you were to walk over this, you would find their burrow entrances sort of hidden in the grass
and sometimes you can see the little trails that they use when they're running around these little
sort of, you know, auklet highways. And so, here's how we find out how the auklets
are doing in any particular year. What we do is, so auklets
you know, they spend the days at sea, and they only come back to their colonies at night.
Although they will use, if they are incubating an egg, they will be within their burrow during the
day. And so, what we do is we use these infrared cameras.
On these sorts of burrow scopes, sort of like a plumber does. You know, when they're, when they
want to go through and see how your pipes are doing. And so what this shows is Scott Pearson,
on the left, on Destruction island in and amongst the willows and on the right as Scott, and I
think it's Peter Hodum, but it's hard to tell because their heads are covered.
Because the way it works is that you take the burrow probe, you stick it into the burrow, you
kinda work it in, and work around, the burrows are often quite twisty, and so there's a lot of kind
of maneuvering and cursing and muttering, and getting very tired and dirty, and you have this
this cover over your head, because on your face, you're wearing this visor that lets you look at
what the cameras feed is, what the camera sees. And often, what the camera sees is just dirt.
Then, you know, the lens will get covered. You have to drag it out.
You know, clean it off, stick it back in, then, as you're working down these tunnels, you know,
you're trying to interpret, That's grass, that's a bug.
That's a rock . It's really, really interesting,
but eventually what often happens is you get to the
end of the tunnel, and this is what you see. So it's one of those instances where science, you
know, it's interpreting these images, it can be as much art as science.
So, you know, when you're twisting these cameras, and you know they flip all the way over and
so, the thing to know about this image is that this way, this is up.
So, the camera has come in on its side, if you look at what you see, is this, eye shine. So that
since it's an infrared camera, it's shining this infrared light in the eye of the auklet will shine
back. So, that's the eye that's the beak. And what this is,
is that's an outline of, basically, what the
bird is, is that this is a chick, so it's a chick that's in, its,
actually, we would call it kind of a partially feather chick. It's still
pretty downy, but it's starting to get some feathers around its head.
And, yeah, so the way, the auklet, the tunnels, or the borrows are structured is, that the tunnel
will go through, sometimes it'll fork. So, there might be chambers like this
that are empty, or there'll be dead-ends and things like that,
that are super fun to try to, try to interpret.
So we visit the islands three times a year for auklet monitoring. And this is what we're looking
for. This is a chick that is out in the open and I should note that this is not our picture, we
actually never see the chicks. We don't take them out of their burrow, but some people who know
the other teams in other places that do, might use artificial nest boxes or that sometimes they can
kind of dig into the burrows. And you pluck the chick out and you weigh it and you put it back.
This is a chick that's fairly far along. And you can see, you know that it's, it's gray like its
parents. It still has some down around its head
and the other thing to notice is the little nub of horn at the
base of its bill that indicates, you know, it's a kind of its namesake, what it will
become as it gets older.
So the other thing that we do is we look at what auklets eat or while we're looking at how they
breed, we're also looking at how they're, how they're feeding their young.
This is a picture of an auklet from Protection
Island that has a bill load, or it has its mouthful of small fish, forage fish
called Sand Lance. And auklets, So they lay a single egg. A pair
of auklets will lay a single egg. So they only have one chick.
Then what they do is they spend the day at sea, foraging for that chick and also for themselves,
and then at night, they come back under cover of darkness. And they land there on the
island. And then they scuttle over to their burrow entrance and they sneak down into the burrow.
And then, they drop all the food on the ground for the chick, and then the chick can kind of eat at
its pleasure. And so, as you can see from this bill, I've probably heard about this with puffins,
too, but auklets can hold a lot of fish in their bills. They kind of hold them crosswise with their
tongues, have little denticles that they can use to kind of pin individual fish,
so they can catch a lot of fish during the day.
And then, sometimes you'll see them, they gather kind of on the waters in front of the island, you
know, at dusk and in the evening before it gets really dark. They just kinda sit there and they
have fish hanging out of their bills. They look kind of funny.
So, what do the auklets eat? What this shows is that an auklet has a pretty varied diet. This is a
way of showing that, so what, this is called, this is a non-metric, multidimensional scaling
graph. Which I realize there's a lot of words that, you know, may not mean a ton to you, but the
main point is to show that the two islands are pretty distinct.
Destruction is kinda the gray black one on the left end. And Protection is the blue
one on the right. The particular points are, the black dots are the years.
So, what this method shows is how in a, depending on the year, auklets are more likely to eat a
particular type of fish. So, all those letters that you see, the light letters are fish species.
And the main thing to know from this graph is that never the twain shall meet the dietary
practices of auklets on Destruction and Protection
don't overlap at all, really. And so this is really a reflection of the two
systems, the different systems, in which they live.
You know, another, sort of, interesting feature of the fact that, even though the two, the two
colonies are quite close to each other, you know, they're only
80 miles apart, I think I said, roughly as the crow flies.
You know, those are very different worlds that the auklets are living in.
But still, you know, even within those different worlds, a few main species emerged the auklets
prefer. And in the Destruction island, their diet is a bit more diverse.
The main species that we see them catch over the years. This is a picture of Sand lance,
and these are Pacific herring.
These are anchovy, Northern anchovy. Then these are smelt and they're usually a couple of types of
smelt. That we see are White Bait smelt and the Surf smelt and I think these
are Surf smelt.
And that's in contrast to Protection Island, where we really only see two things: Sand lance and
the herring. Although I should say sometimes, we do see salmon
from time to time in both places. And this is an interesting thing. Sometimes you see an auklet
eating a fish. That was in the midst of eating something else.
So, this salmon was eating a herring, when the auklet caught it and when we caught the auklet so
that we could capture its bill load, we found this little salmon that had a fish sticking out of it,
and we dually extracted it, and, oo'ed and awed over it.
I don't know, it's just one of the field delights.
And so this is how their diets look over the years. You can see that at Destruction Island, not
only are they more varied in the main prey species they eat, but their species can switch.
So, what you're looking at here is a stacked graph of, basically, species percent would be the
percent of a species that made up an auklet bill load.
So here's the main thing to see. In this case, gray, the gray bar, the gray part of the bar, is
Northern anchovy, and the purple part of the bar are smelt species.
So you see that in 20 10, in 2010, auklets at Destruction,
where mostly catching, anchovy and a little bit of smelt. A little
bit, the yellow is rockfish, and so they would catch some juvenile rockfish. And then that held
true, also in 2013 big anchovy, really big anchovy year, no rockfish, but then in 2016,
it started to change.
So, you can see that the anchovies are becoming less and less of the auklets bill loads. And in 2017
the big red bar is herring, and that's when herring appeared.
And excuse me, Sand lance is also pretty big that year too.
Then as in 2018,
it was big. It was a lot of smell, a lot of herring, and very little anchovy. And
then by 2019, the anchovy are mostly gone.
Now it's predominantly smelt. A little bit of Sand lance and some other. But you can see how
even just in 10 years there can be that pronounced of a
shift in the auklet diet. And compare that to Protection Island where you can see is that
it is mostly Sand lance and mostly herring all the time. There might be some wiggle in, you know,
rough percentages of each, but it's still going to be a Sand lance and herring driven world there.
So then the question becomes, you know, if this is a story of climate
resilience, how do we sort of classify the climate?
So, you look at this picture and you think, oh, my goodness, the Blob, you know, how do you
begin to translate this kind of frightening image into a data signature that you can use to uncover
patterns of diet and breeding success? So what you can do is look at a suite of marine
conditions. And so, this is a I acknowledge that this is
quite a figure. But don't freak out.
So the main thing to know here is that the top two bars are basin wide,
like huge measures. P D O is the Pacific Decadal
Oscillation. That's a measure of sort of the marine state of the Pacific as a
whole. The M E I is the multivariate El Nino index so that's kind of a rough measure of warmth.
You know how inclined the Pacific is to be an El Nino. Then you know it kind of works down.
So, the next level as these region-wide things. So we've gone, we've gone from describing the
whole Pacific Ocean to describing this, sort of the northeast Pacific region around, you know,
the California Current where to be sort of upwelling indices.
So the upwelling as you probably as you may have heard, this is a big
it's really important out here on the West Coast.
That's what you know, seasonal upwelling in the spring is what brings all
these nutrients from the depths up to the surface where they become accessible to phytoplankton
and zooplankton. You know, they serve the base of the food web,
which is why we have so much stuff out here, which is why it's so productive.
And then the bottom, the last eight graphs are sort
of island-specific sea surface temperatures in the spring, and the summer, those are the top two,
and then productivity measures, of sort of primary productivity.
The other thing to note is that the red band through each of
these is the are the Blob years. And so what you see is that, in the Blob years,
A lot of these metrics, a lot of these indices, are either
really high or really low compared to other years. But it isn't necessarily consistent, you know.
Sometimes, like, if you look at Panel G, for instance,
the spring, the sea surface temperature at Destruction Island in the summer, it was higher.
It was elevated but it wasn't unusually elevated beyond other years.
It was actually in, say, if you go up one to E, the sea surface temperature in the spring at
Destruction Island, that was when it was really high. That
was when you see its more pronounced Blob signature.
So what you can do is you can take all of these measures,
12 of them mixed them up into this big kind of quantitative stew, and you come up with
it with a sort of single index value that you can use to say, OK, in years when the that value was
high, those are Blob years. When that value is low, those are just sort of more moderate years.
And then you can compare that to different, sort of breeding, you know, breeding success and
diet characteristics and things like that. So when you do that, if you look at the
breeding metrics over the years, so here, this is looking at
three different breeding metrics for the Rhinoceros auklets, again, with the Marine
Heatwaves, the Blob here is highlighted in red, and so the black line Destruction Island, the blue
line is Protection Island. What you see is that the auklets were actually, you know, pretty
steady. The line that runs between the dots is the sort of quantitative average, you know, to
account for what may be observer error, or things like that. What you see
so A, the top panel, is burrow occupancy. And we called, we considered a burrow, an auklet burrow
to the occupied if the pair was in it and had laid an egg.
And so, you can see that it's actually pretty high,
all the time, especially at Protection. There's,
it's, from 2010 to all through the heatwave through 2016.
It's, well, you know, nearly 80%, which is pretty good.
You see a bit of a dip at Destruction where between 2013,
where it's near 70%, and then in 2014 it drops to about 50% and it stays low in 2015.
It rises to maybe about 55% but then by 2016 it's gone back to about what it normally is.
The same is true with hatch success. That means the number of eggs that auklets lay that hatched
chicks or chicks hatch from eggs, you know. Because that can be a sort of a measure of the
physical condition of the females. Or also, you know, if a bird is incubating an egg and then
suddenly it's having trouble finding food for itself and you know it could just abandon,.
abandon the nest and decide, you know, well, I'll just try it next year, seabirds do that a lot. But
you can see that at both islands, that Destruction of Protection, that hatch
success stayed pretty high.
You know, there's a little bit of inner know, inter year wobble but that's nothing out of the
ordinary. And then with fledging success at the bottom, fledging success is a measure of, well, if
you have a chick, did that chick survive to leave the nest to fledge
or to leave the burrow and fledge and set out on its own?
Here you see a little bit more of what you can think of as a Blob effect.
In the sense that, from 2014 to 2016, you see a
pretty marked decline at Protection Island. You see that blue sort of
cascading from up over 80% in 2014, down to about 50%, in 2016. But note, also, that
Destruction Island, there's a little bit of a dip, but it isn't,
it isn't a huge one. Then by 2017, both islands are backup where
they normally would be doing, do you know, ticking along doing pretty well.
So basically, the main thing to note with this is that the auklets didn't do too badly.
You know, there was none of the, none of the catastrophic declines that you saw with some other
species and other places like the Common murre,
the Cassin's auklet. There was no sort of massive collapse, at least at the two
colonies we looked at.
Likewise, with prey species. So,
one of the things that's a little bit unfortunate, that's one of the,
you know, sometimes you're like, Oh, if only, but we only sampled diet for one of the Blob years
at Destruction Island, and that happened to be the year
that was probably in the, you know, where the
auklets were in the midst of a long term transition
away from anchovy over to smelt. But at Protection Island, you know, I mean, the herring is a bit
higher than the smelt or the Sand lance is a bit lower. That's the blue and the red.
But otherwise, it seems like a year that was, years that were pretty stable.
Similarly, with diet metrics. So these three graphs, they show on the top graph is build load
mass. So, how much all that fish that an auklet was carrying would weigh, so a single auklet flies
in with a bill load full of fish. How much do all those fish weigh?
The middle panel is how many fish makeup that bill load. So
are the auklets bringing back say one really big fish or many small
fish? Then at the bottom is how much or what's the nutritional value of those fish?
You know, we have a way of converting the size of a fish to how much energy it provides. And so
again, you know, unlike with the breeding metrics,
where we know there was a little bit of a decline, it was pretty steady here.
You can see some pretty pronounced island differences,
and that different things are going on at the islands. So Destruction Island,
you know, is pretty flat. Bill load masses,
it shows a slight decline, but nothing too, too serious. The number of fish
that auklets were bringing back was a lot more dynamic and varied. So, again, at Destruction
Island, the black and gray, that's, it's pretty steady.
It's pretty, a flat band. But at Protection Island, there's this big jump in the middle of the
heatwave where suddenly they started bringing back a lot more fish.
And commensurately at the same time or concurrently, sorry,
the energy content of those fish of the bill loads, dropped a bit in 2016.
But then it came back by 2018.
And so, the auklets I mean were sitting pretty during the Blob.
I mean, that was one of the things we had set out, and we're, so, all of this work actually
we just published a paper on it in a journal. And when we were starting to write the paper,
looking at 10 years of data and how I all related a Blob, you were expecting to see, like,
everywhere else, that, you know, the auklets really took it in the shorts.
But, instead, we saw a lot of, you know, localized effects, local dynamics. And so it was
interesting in that sense, because a lot of the sort of Blob
the stories /the narrative that has come out of the blob, is this wide scale,
you know, broad scale effects that were pretty uniform.
You saw that, remember, that earlier graph that showed, you know, everything kind of flipping or
declining and then doing that. But it, I think one of the values of this work, was showing that
there's a lot, there can be a lot of variation on small geographic scales.
And that's so it's, it's worth it looking at, you know, looking at
different spots closely and watching them and seeing,
you know, even if they're slightly different, especially, actually appear
in slightly different systems how those systems respond.
So, as I said, happy auklets. These are a couple of auklets, near the Salish Sea, looking
strutty and sort of proud of themselves, but sadly, not so fast.
Because now I go to the second part of the talk, which is the
Unusual Mortality Event, or a Postmodern Climate Mystery.
So I'm returning to the breeding metrics graph that
you may recall. So this is where I want you to kinda zero in on one part of it. And that's this
dot here, the low year in 2016. So, in terms of what is going on in that year
that suddenly made it so much worse than the other two years in the
heart of the Blob. What happened in this year?
And so, this year, in 2016, there was what we call an unusual mortality event or a die off of
auklets. This was in June of 2016, a visitor at the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge reported
seeing auklets walking on the beach that were, quote, unquote, "kind of acting woozy". And then,
subsequently, after that Refuge staff found seven dead auklets on the beach and sent them to the
US. Geological Survey Wildlife Health Center, which is in Madison, Wisconsin.
So sometimes, what happens is, if you find a bunch of dead birds on a beach, and it looks like
they're dying because of disease, or if they're, you know, suddenly a lot of dead birds show up
that haven't been there before, you send them to find out if they're sick.
And so the question was, where are these few birds that we're showing up
on Dungeness, were they indicative of a larger trend?
And so I am, this is what's called the COASST Heartbeat.
And the COASST is the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team. It's a program at the
University of Washington that sends hundreds of volunteers out every month to sites all over
Oregon and Washington, and in Alaska.
And they go out and each team has a little stretch of beach to call their own. And they go walk
that each once a month, and they count all the dead stuff that they find.
I mean dead birds. And this is focused pretty much
on dead birds, but they do a lot of other work too. Now they've actually started working on
marine debris, which is pretty cool.
But what this is called, COASST, as the years go by, they developed the COASST heartbeat. And that's what you
can see here, is kind of the baseline, which is at the bottom of each of these three graphs. That's
just sort of da, da, da, da, da, which is a periodic pulse of dead birds
that happens every year, usually in the winter
after young birds have fledged. They fledge at the end of the summer. They fly out and to sea, the
North Pacific is a pretty, can be a pretty harsh environment in the winter.
and so you get what's called kind of winter kill,
and it's a regular feature, you know. It's nothing to be too bothered by. I
mean, you obviously ask that for the individual birds themselves, but
it's not a sign of something underlying, some underlying badness that you need to be especially
concerned about.
But sometimes you get these pulses of death. And you can see the top one in the Salish Sea, that
is in the, one on the far right, those big red spikes,
those were 2016 and that, those are the years
of the auklet die off. This auklet die off diagram is from Protection. But the other thing that's
interesting to notice is that there are actually a lot of little spikes periodically. So,
you can see, there was one, you know, a month in
2006 on the Washington Outer coast and on the Oregon coast, where suddenly they found
a whole bunch of dead auklets. But, you know, that wasn't, that's also thought to be climate related.
And then another time. In 2012, they found a bunch. But, the one that I'm focusing on is 2016.
And so, that's the, you know,
this is what it looks like a little more closely as this, if I say kinda,
it persisted. I guess that's sort of the point of this.
As you can see, it started in June and then there was a big spike, it just suddenly shut up, in sort
of late summer. You know, June, July, August, a little bit in September and then it stopped.
It went back down and then we're back to just the normal COASST heartbeat.
That, yes, that's the die off. And so this is what it looked like sort of geographically.
So this is, these are data from COASST and the BCBBS it's the British Columbia Beach Bird Survey
data. The A is May, B is June, C is July. D is August.
And so, the different colors of the dots show whether or not - if it's red, it was a dedicated
survey by either COASST or BCBBS, or in the blue as opportunistic.
So it's just somebody who happens to be out or I mean is out looking but isn't part of
the survey effort.
So you can see that in May suddenly there's a lot showing up on Dungeness Spit. Then in June and
July it spreads widely, you know, suddenly across in Sydney, on the San Juan’s, on Whidbey
Island, and farther out. You know, that's about one of those dots on the outer side of that of that
circle is Anacortes and a little bit out onto the Outer Coast. But suddenly there are a lot of dead
auklets.
And that goes on through June and July, but always you know this at Destruction, or, excuse me,
at Dungeness Spit they' re always finding a lot of stuff. And then by August in D,
it's pretty it started to calm down quite a bit.
So, when they sent the carcasses to the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, they found
out that there was a bacterial pathogen after a necropsy was done. And so, this was, this is the paper that
came out of it, the title of it, the Detection of.. the bacterial pathogen
is called Bisgaard Taxon 40. That's one of the things,
where, they're just so many, so many different diseases that they don't all
have cool names. Sometimes, that's just pure taxon, Bisgaard Taxon 40, which I think has been recently
renamed to something similarly more clinical and if I may be boring, but this was from when
they were hot to trot 2019, so they hopped on it.
And this is an image from that paper showing the pathology of sickened birds with lesions that ,you
know, were associated with the bacterial infection.
And there, you know, that there's some on the lungs and some in the pectoral muscles. So that, you
know, these were sick birds and they had been, they had been sort of enfeebled. But the authors of
that paper made an interesting note. As they said, we do not know whether Bisgaard Taxon 40
acted as a primary pathogen or given the emaciated good body condition of these birds simply as
opportunistic pathogens. So, it was kind of a chicken - egg question.
Where, was is it that
you know, the birds are really skinny. You know, there's, I mean, there's some sort of veterinary
debate about what emaciated really means, but the birds, the birds that they were looking at were
pretty skinny. And that was kind of a feature of what people are finding, were skinny dead birds. So
where they were skinny, because they were sick, or were they sick
did they get sick because they were skinny? In other words, was it the pathogen that caused the
death? Or was it something else, and that's something else, was the probable prey.
So that leaves us with the question, is there a way to determine this
sort of causative agent here? Can we, can we actually get to the
answer to this chicken or egg question? And, you know, this has, this is what we're
working on now. So it hasn't been put through peer review.
But I would, say here, you know, feeling wild and daring that it is possible to at least, you know,
take some of the methods that we used or focus on Protection Island and maybe look at several
lines of evidence that we can use to approach this question. And so those things that we use are
burrow occupancy again. This is a picture of the
side of Protection Island, that sort of rumpled character of the bluff.
It's all those are all burrows. So, I mean, this just gives you a sense of just how many burrows
there are just on this one side of this fairly large island. I mean,
this probably contains well over a 1,000 or 2,000 burrows.
And then, again, we look at fledging success. Here's this guy again -
our friend. We look at the marine conditions. And so, here what I did was I pulled out the ones
that we used for Protection Island. So, again, we go from a large, you know, basin-scale
metrics like the PDO or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
and the multivariate El Nino Index, the measure of El Nino. But then everything else
was local. you know, the sea surface temperatures in the spring and the summer, and net primary
productivity in the spring and summer, and then the last two this measure of upwelling.
Then here, again, The red band is the Blob years because the die off took place in the
last year of the Blob.
Then, again, not last but not least, we look at prey abundance and condition.
So to remember this graph, but now with the Blob sort of situated over it again.
And but the other thing that we can do is, we can do a little bit more because at the same time
that while we are measuring the prey that the auklets are catching, NOAA’s researchers, NOAA’s
biologists are doing these beach seines along the Northern Olympic Peninsula coast - the north
coast of Northern Olympic Peninsula. And so we can look at how the auklets are doing compared
to how the beach seines are doing.
And the interesting thing, this is all the beach seine sites
that folks were using, you can see all, they are sort of classed them by area.
And here's Protection island here, this little spot and most of these sites. So an auklet can fly,
since an auklet is spending the entire day foraging so that it can bring back one
mouthful of fish to it’s chicks, it can fly a long way. We know that they can go about 50
kilometers or at least and sometimes even more . So, you can see at the bottom here, the scale of 50
kilometers is a good chunk. And so that's, you know, out pretty, you know, an auklet without
really breaking a sweat, can get out to Port Angeles. And maybe you know, if it wants to the
Elwha River or it may not go there at all, you know, I got up to the San Juans or something.
But the point is, that the auklets can range far,
and this is how we get a sense of how they're doing versus how the beach seine is doing.
And so, this is when you, when you take all of those and take all of those metrics, that are
occupancy rates, fledgling success rates, marine conditions.
And then you look at the two main species that they're eating:
Pacific sand lance, Pacific herring, and then the bottom is catch per
unit effort, Which is a measure of how hard the seiners are working or the beach seiners are
working to catch fish.
And so here the red bar shows the last two years of the Blob.
The gray bar is the year of the die off.
So if you look at the proportion of burrows with eggs, the burrow occupancy rates, they were
elevated actually in the year of the die off, but it was fledging success that really dove. That
was. If you recall that the value was down at about 50%, which was much lower than the
average, that's what the dashed lines show.
So the average fledging success over the long term study is around 80%. And that year, it was
quite low. When I talked about the marine conditions,
so that's the PC1 is when you take them all and you put them into the stew and you get that
single value, and if the value is high, that means the Blob.
So this is what you can see is in the year of the die off, you're still living with
Blob conditions in the Salish Sea.
Then they plunged, you know, that
the marine conditions became a lot more moderate.
Then, if you look at the prey type, what the Pacific sand lance and Pacific herring graph is
showing is the comparison between how the auklets
did, this individual size of fish that the auklet caught and the individual
the size of individual fish that the NOAA Survey caught.
And so, the thing to note in both of these, is how the
auklet usually does better than the survey, you know, because the auklet can target fish,
it can move around. There are all sorts and sort of
caveats about making a comparison between an auklet and a static survey.
But the thing to note is that in most years the auklet does a lot
better except in 2016 and for herring in 2016 and 2017.
So for all the inherent advantages that an auklet
has as a foragers as a hunter of fish in 2016 and 2017, in 2016
especially, and in a lesser degree in 2017, it didn't do very well.
They weren't, they did, something made it so that those auklets weren't doing that great, and that
is a little it's sort of reinforced by the the bottom years
or by the bottom graph, which shows catch per unit effort.
And that you can see that in the Blob years, you know, the first year they were able to catch - the
beach seine was able to catch a pretty good amount of herring. There is a lot of you know, variation
between the sites. That's why the little whisker over the dot is so long.
But then, it just plunged, you know, in 2016, 2017, 2018, just really low. They, they weren't,
catching very much for as hard as they were you know, as hard as they were working.
Then, by 2019, it went back up to what it would normally be.
And so, that's sort of begins to point to an answer of, you know, there was something in 2016
that made it, you know, while they, that made it to the auklets which normally would be able to do
better than the seine, even in years when ,
even in difficult years, like the Blob years, that there was
something in 2016 that made it so that they did very poorly.
And that is further reinforced
if you look back at the Diet Metrics graph, that in 2016, that was the year
so this is, you know, putting the die off band over this, you know, the gray.
You can see that's a year when the energy of the bill loads was really, really low. And the number
of fish that they were catching was a lot higher, and their bill load mass was, was lower, too. So
you go from you know, in the middle of the heatwave mind you in 2015,
There were bill load masses high, the number of fish were low. So, it's like they're catching big
fish and the energy was high so that they were catching, they were, they had nice big fish.
They didn't have to catch a lot of them and they were energetically nutritious. But in 2016, the
year of the die off, their bill load mass dropped, they had to catch a lot
more small fish and the energy was really low.
So, this is another thing to really look at is a comparison between 2016 and 2017. Because in
those years you know, the conditions, if you remember, were mostly the same.
That was still a low year for the catch per unit effort of herring.
But in that year, you know, the auklets, the bill load mass was a little bit elevated but the number
of fish was much higher. So if you take the number of fish to mean a kind of foraging effort, they
are working hard and they're able to work harder to catch more fish.
So that was when you started to see the energy kind of creep back up. Because something, you
know, between 2016 and 2017, in 2017 when they weren't sick, they are able to expend a little
more energy catch more fish. And those fish were know that raised the energy content of
those bill loads that they brought back to their chicks, so that their chicks did better.
And so there are some other clues that we could kind of look at.
The, you know, we looked at marine pollutant levels in the
bodies and they were, they were considerably, they're a lot elevated.
So these are organic chlorides and PBDEs or Polybrominade something, something like that.
I’m not a chemist. Oh, polybrominated diphenyl ethers.
Yeah. I had it right there.
But anyway, these were elevated in dead auklets compared to other auklets that have been
caught in other years. So in the die off year, there
were marine pollutants in their bodies and in their fat. And so if your food stressed, you start
to sort of use your body fat. And if you're, if you're metabolizing your body fat and your body fat
is full of marine pollutants, that's not good for you.
And the other thing is by looking at their body condition. So, the body condition of the dead
auklets, as I mentioned in 2016, they showed signs of emaciation,
but some were in fair condition too.
So, then, it becomes was it just kind of just a perfect storm of a year? So you had marine conditions that
were suboptimal because it was the last year of the Blob.
The prey quality was low because, you know, because of the Blob in part. They were having
trouble finding fish and then there weren't, there weren't that
many fish to find, and a lot of the fish they were finding were smaller.
Because they were having trouble finding fish, they were catabolizing their own sort of fat stores.
And those fat stores were full of marine pollutants.
And so, they were, you know, that further kind of made them sick and then throw into that, you
know, the specialness of that year was the marine pathogen, that Bisgaard taxon 40 which
showed up, and so you have the foods stressed auklets that were already weakened because they
increased contaminant load, then this pathogen comes in and makes them sick, and because of
that, that perfect little box right in the middle, which leads to lots of dead auklets.
And then, another question is, is it because with wildlife disease, you know, wildlife disease is
predicted to increase with climate change, sort of worsening, becoming more severe because
generally warmer waters are sicker waters. And so the question that people wonder as if this
pathogen is sort of always present if, you know, just kinda at background rates
or you know, background levels? And then because of this, suddenly warmer conditions it did
have suddenly just kinda flared up. And there's some folks doing some blood work right now to
look at auklets during reasonable years and more moderate years, to see if the
disease is just always kinda there.
And so that, I mean, that's sort of where we are with that right now.
I think it's kinda one of the neat things about, you know, how questions work in science. Where
you can, know, you start with something, like we started with this question, How did rhinoceros
auklets fair in the Blob years? We found a kind of provisional answer to that they did pretty
OK. But then, you know, from that comes all these other questions about, you know, well why
did they do poorly in one particular year? And this one particular place? And then suddenly
you're exploring elements of wildlife disease. You're looking at interactions
between physiology and ecology.
All of this is kind of born of just, you know, settling in and watching animals in a place, in a
fairly straightforward manner, just looking at how they do, you know, how many are laying eggs, hw
many chicks are fledging? And conceptually these are fairly simple questions and but from these
simple questions, you'd be able to uncover these large natural experiments that are going on right
in front of you. And so one of the things that we're doing now as we kind of move forward is
we're starting to put, we're putting GPS tags on auklets to see where they're going to fish
because if you remember, they tend to do better than just sort of the general seine, the general
survey. And so we want to know what the auklets know about the Salish Sea as a space.
How do they know, in years that we think conditions
might be a little more severe, how do they know where to go? Or where do they go to find
food? And, are those places / spots that we can try to protect on their behalf.
So, watch this space of other words, There's, there's still
interesting auklet stuff happening. And so, now, I'm happy to take questions.
Yeah, and that’s it as far as I am.
[Grant] Thank you, Eric. Awesome.
[Eric] There we go.
All right.
So, since we have a little bit of time, hopefully folks can stay with us,
Give us an opportunity to ask you some of the questions that have been put into the question
box. I'm just gonna kinda go in order. And Grant, I'm assuming you will take turns with me?
[Grant] Yeah, I'm trying to find those questions right now.
[Chris] OK.
All right, so the very first one we have is from Michelle and she asked
Did the Blob affect Humpback whales?
[Eric] Yes. I think.
I mean the Blob affected everything in different ways. I'm not a whale guy so I should
probably not get too far out over my skis.
But I think there are a lot of, I mean, one of the main effects that you saw were, things that didn't
necessarily die, but you saw a lot of range shifts. You saw things going places
they normally wouldn't go to look for food. And I think, if I’m remembering correctly, that
might be sort of where it showed up with Humpbacks. It wasn't, I don't think they had that,
this is when I dimly recall I heard this thing, I might have read somewhere once.
But yeah, now essentially I have a friend who works on whale entanglement and with Humpback
and is looking at it kind of as they move more up into these sort of crab pot waters.
How there are a lot more kinds of encounters with human fishers, fisheries,
and that's becoming a thing.
And so this expectation that as marine conditions changed, the Humpbacks range is, you know,
bringing it more into kind of human - wildlife, conflict zones, I guess you could say.
[Grant] Cool. The
next question is from Krista and it says, Protection Island and Destruction Island, who
gave these islands their rather unusual names and why? [Eric] Oh, that is, such a fantastic question!
So I am working on a book about Rhinoceros auklets actually,
and, so I've been spending a lot of time with the histories of these two islands.
And Destruction Island, in particular, is roiled, I guess, you could say.
So, if you, this is one of those things, and I'll have to be very careful not to go
off on this really long tangent. But it's one of those things
where you look at the sort of official account, and then you compare sort of
other voices, shall we say? So the official account,
for the name of Destruction Island, is that, in 1775, the Spanish were
sailing up the coast of, what is now Washington, and there it was Bruno de Hezeta, who's, I hope
I'm saying his name correctly. But, anyway, he's commemorated by Heceta Head, I think, in Oregon.
And so, it was him and his sort of lieutenant Bodega y Quadra or Bodega, I think it was a
Bodega, and they came up to what's now, you know, what we call Point Grenville, and, and they,
they were in these two ships. And so,
Hezeta kept anchored at Grenville, and Bodega was a little bit north, and near the mouth
of the, what's now, you know, the Quinault River. And Hezeta went ashore, and he did a,
he and a large crew of people went ashore and did a land claiming ceremony.
And while that was happening, I think a little farther north,
Bodega sent a small contingent of his
sailors ashore to collect water and cut down a tree to make a new top mast. And when the small
crew of seven and a little boat, when they get ashore they are, as the state says, attacked by
Indians. So suddenly 300 Indians appear and kill the Bodega sailors, and that's that.
And then the Spanish, you know, they're upset.
They sail on, but not before they name the but, you know,
Point Grenville they name it Punta de los Martires, "the point of the martyrs."
And then in 1787, this English fellow, that's English fur trader, I think he was Charles Barkley,
is sailing up the same stretch and he anchors, near the island, Destruction Island near the river
there, which is now the Hoh River. And he sends a small contingent ashore, and they get killed
by the Indidians. You know, they are massacred by the Indians.
So he named the river where his
sailors died Destruction River.
And then in 1792, when George Vancouver was coming up with sailing up the shore, he
renamed the river. You know, they're the English,
you're trying to kind of get rid of the Spanish names, although they didn't fully succeed.
But he renames the river, the Hoh river, and he takes the name Destruction River, and he puts it
on Destruction Island. He names that. Because Bodega had also named it so they named it. As he
says, or the archives say, the Punta de los Martires ,from that point of the martyrs. And they
named the island Isla de Dolores, the Island of Sorrows.
So, the English come through, they rename the river
the Hoh river,
for the people that live there. They renamed the island from the Island of Sorrows to Destruction,
Island, and Destruction Island, it has remained ever since.
So what you have is this kind of narrative of explorers minding their own business, and then the
Indians attack, for no reason whatsoever. The actual history as a lot more complicated, as you
might imagine. And there's a really, really good book to read called The Sea Is My Country by
Josh Reid, which is the maritime history of the Makah. And that gets into some of the twists and
turns of that particular tale which show that, you know, it isn't like the Spanish just went, you
know, just said, Oh, shoot, the natives killed our people,
I guess we'll move on. They actually did quite a lot of killing on their own.
And also, there's some mixed identity. it's thought that it was Quinaults
who may have, you know, who killed Bodegas'
men. But Bodegas, men may have killed Quileutes who are coming to help because of
complicated polity, you know, the politics of the Coast Salish time. You know, it wasn't like, you
know, these aren't all, one people doing all one thing. There's a lot of internal dynamics the
Spanish were ignorant of and just sailing into.
So, anyway, Destruction Island, it's resonantly named, you know, in that sense of like, well, it's
named for the destruction supposedly of the sailors,
but it's, it's as an island standing sentinel, you know, to who exactly is it watching be destroyed
as the years progressed? Probably not really the Spanish and English.
And then Protection Island was named by Vancouver.
And it's got its own kind of interesting history.
It's a little more contemporary.
Of how people, you know that once it was sort of fully absorbed into, you know,
Washington State, there was this effort to as you probably may have heard there was
an effort to sort of turn it into a
housing subdivision. They actually plotted the land and we're going to sell it so
that people could build homes. But it turns out that there wasn't potable water.
The water was undrinkable, which seems like the sort of thing you would want to establish
before you started selling land or at least buying land. Maybe you're free to sell whatever you
want, unfortunately, but maybe, before you buy, make sure you'll have water to drink. But there's
one fellow out there, Marty Bluewater, who was sort of grandfathered in
and still has a house out there.
But anyway, it's called Protection, I think you know, the Strait of Juan de Fuca can get pretty
exciting,
maritimely, I guess you could say. You know and if you, but if you want a nice place to sit and
ride out the waves, Protection was a good place to do it.
[Grant] Excellent. Thank you.
[Chris] Yeah, interesting stories there. So, we have a question from Donna: Did the
Blob negatively affect fish population which is resulting in the auklets being forced to
eat different kinds of fish? [Eric] That's a good question.
Presumably, the answer is yes. There are some species that weren't doing so well.
There are others that point to doing a little better.
The, I mean, it seems like the shift away from anchovies have been going on for several years,
and maybe the Blob kind of finished them off as it were.
But I think anchovies in other places have also been doing poorly.
And, you know, what matters, the interesting thing with the auklets
is there are some, you know, for / in other places, where people have done tagging work, they've
found the auklets are more, that foraging auklets tend to home in on places more than
species. So, they will go to a spot because, you know, and they don't really care what
they find there.
They'll just keep going to that spot and so what we would think is happening is that the auklets,
you know, auklets are going to their preferred spots and suddenly the anchovies are gone. And so
they're just like, Oh, what've we got and they're taking smelt instead. We find all sorts of crazy or
not crazy, but different things in auklet bill loads.
I mean, you find these strange souls that, know, sometimes, especially in the middle of the
breeding season, when there are a lot /when the chicks and, you know, you know, the chicks are
large and auklets are bringing their food back, and you'll see an auklet that brings back this
single, tiny, little worthless fish and you're like: Come on,
you know, try a little harder. And then,
there's some that really bring back these monstrous bill loads. And,
I'm like, Oh, somebody's eating well tonight.
But, the interesting thing, also, is that, you know, that diet really varies. I mean, you get a
glimpse of it here at Destruction and Protection. But if you go up into Canada, for instance,
there's some really big auklet colonies in British Columbia.
There's a place called Triangle Island that's justly famous for having think it's 40,000 auklet
pairs. And they're, you know, there the auklets are eating a lot of Pacific saury,
which is another type of forage fish.
That's, you know, it's long and skinny.
But, yeah, the auklets will take what the sea gives them.
And there's some interesting features of their life history which makes them, which may kind of
insulate them a little bit from marine conditions that may hurt other species and that their chicks
take a long time to grow. And so, perhaps they can withstand or, you know,
endure periods of lower, you know, it's not like their energetic requirements are
really, really high because they need to grow really fast
like, say, what puffin chicks grow pretty quickly relative to their size.
So, a puffin is about a third, again, as big as an auklets but their chicks develop at about the same
timeframe. So, that means that the auklet or the Tufted puffins chick is developing faster. And so,
auklet can kind of extend that period so that, you know, things are a little bit lean their chicks
will spend a little more time in the burrow before they decide to leave.
That's a very long answer, to
What happened to the fish?
[Chris] Thank you.
[Gant] This next question comes from Naomi Himley and she's asking about the bill load again: Are you
capturing these via mist nets? [Eric] Ah, yes.
[Grant] The second, [Eric] Go ahead.
[Grant] the second part of her question talks about the US Fish and Wildlife Service doing work to
remove invasive rabbits from Destruction island?
[Eric] Yes. Those are both good questions.
So the first one, how we catch the bill loads or get the bill loads? We use what's called a
spotlighting method, which is to say that what we do is we go out into the middle of the colony
at night when the auklets are coming back and we have headlamps on and you just kinda sit.
And, while you're sitting you, just wait, and you wait for the auklets to come land near you and
it's really this kind of, you know I know, it's not pleasant for the auklets. I
know they hate it. I know, it's like, I feel bad about that.
You know, it's, you have to be mindful of how you are stressing an animal.
But for me, if I separate that, if I'm like, OK,
I'm sorry, auklets, please accept my apology. I love
that kinda, when you hear them coming in it's like these little helicopters you hear this "rrrrrrrrr"
Because they're, you know, there are little squat,
fat, little birds, and so they have to flap, really
hard. And as they come into a kind of break, they, you know, they splay.
They kind of splay themselves out, you know,
throw out their feet, they kind of go a little bit vertical, and they kind of stall and they drop.
And so, if you're lucky, if you pick a spot, they'll
drop right in front of you. And then what you do is you turn on your headlamp right away and
you shine the beam right down on the auklets. And the auklet you know,
it's obviously not expecting you to see you there, and usually if all goes well they just spit out
their bill load and fly away. They just drop their fishing run. Which is a very logical
response if you're an auklet. Suddenly you're caught in this bright beam, and you're like, I'm
getting the heck out of here. And so then, you know, usually
there's a, you have a little baggie and then you kinda pick
everything up, put it in a baggie, and you mark it down as a bill load, and so that's how we do it.
Sometimes there is a little bit of an element of pursuit where you hear an auklet land near you
and then, you know, you're kind of thrash over to see if it's there and it's kind of hunkered down
hoping that you won't find it. And you feel bad for your kind of human advantages because I
have a headlamp, I have opposable thumbs, I'm big.
And then, you know, it spits out its load and flies away. A question I often get asked is, you
know, What does that do for the chicks?
So the chicks are fed once a night by both parents.
So, you know, there the chicks are or we deprive the chicks of half a half a meal,
a day for one day.
We're usually careful to do bill load sampling in different parts of the colony
so that you're not sampling twice.
And we spread it out so that, you know, even if...
You're not like robbing tons of auklet chicks of their food.
And we're also really careful. We have a minimum number that we seek, that we know
we can use to find out what we need to find out. And we don't go over that number.
I think we typically try to get 15 bill loads for a period, and so that's, you know, there
that so that, it's basically me trying to assure you that we are, you know, not doing undue harm to
any chicks and so far as we know, no chick has died as a result of our work. The question of the
US. Fish and Wildlife Service and the rabbits on Destruction Island,
yeah, I think that work is starting to go forward.
It's been talked about for years. The rabbits are a kind of a holdover of the lighthouse, actually,
that, you know, in the colorful history of Destruction Island.
I mean, it's really interesting with Destruction. I'm sure if you've been to Ruby Beach
or Kalaloch, you can kind of see it out there just sitting on this little slab with
this tiny little nub that is the lighthouse. And it's a pretty small island.
But, you know, lot's been happening there. So they built that lighthouse there in the late 1800s and
it was occupied for many years. And you know, the lighthouse keepers they would
bring their families.
And I think all this sort of accounts of what it's like to live on Destruction, and it sounds really
awful. But they tried to make it a home. You know,
they cleared everything off. They even had a little school. People, they had a cow for a while.
But I think the cow, one of the cows might have gotten washed away.
But a lot of the kids raised rabbits. And
then the rabbits would escape. So now there are a lot of rabbits everywhere.
And so the Fish and Wildlife Service with the WDFW and NOAA are, I think mostly WDFW and
the Fish and Wildlife Service, are going to try to get rid of the rabbits using, I think Island
Conservation, that's the organization they are using, who are really, really good at clearing islands of
pests. It will probably be a lethal removal in that the rabbits will be poisoned in the winter
when there are no birds there, so,
that's unfortunate, but I think that work is starting to go forward.
I mean that it's been approved and may begin in the next year or two, I believe.
[Grant] Excellent. Thank you.
[Chris] I think the last question we had, you so you answered, indirectly. It was asking
[Eric] That's how I answer most questions.
[Chris] Stacey was asking if you, do you give auklets the fish back or something to compensate for
taking their food? [Eric] We do not. We actually use the fish also to look for marine
contaminants. So when we take the fish, we measure them, we weigh them. They've done studies
in the past, that I didn't, I was not a participant in, where they look at plastic pollution. So they look
at how much like micro plastics are in the guts of the fish that might be getting into the auklets.
And I think all the fish that we've captured or collected are in a freezer.
I think at the University of Puget Sound.
And I think we might do some stuff with fatty acid work and stable isotopes to see where the fish
are kind of in the in the, in the food web, what they're eating.
How because it's one of those things where I was
talking with somebody and you know, I like seabirds. I'm a bird guy through and through.
And but whenever you're talking about birds and marine conditions, birds in the ocean, how, you
know, climate change is affecting birds, you're really talking about fish.
And somebody said that to me, and I'm like, this light went off, like, oh, yeah, of course, I mean,
obviously, you're talking about fish, everything's about fish. Bird people get kind of annoyed by
salmon folks, because all salmon people want to do is talk about fish, but really,
it often is just all about fish.
And so, we'll, we're going to be looking at like, how, you know, what's going on with the fish,
like as the fish are reacting to changes in phytoplankton species composition, or zooplankton.
There's some interesting work coming out about the northern community of zooplankton.
There's the sort of northern copepod set, which is tiny little, basically, fish food,
which are really nutrient / fatty. Are getting replaced by southern
copepods species assemblages that are less nutritious.
And so that is suspected, actually are, I think they are fairly sure that that's what drove the
Cassin's auklet die off that I talked about at the beginning,
was the replacement of these copepods that the Cassin's auklets would normally eat or, you
know, I said they are fat and rich, went away and they were replaced by these skinny copepods.
And so, even though the Cassin's auklets were eating a lot, they were eating
kind of diet copepods, and that wasn't enough. And so, that was one of the reasons they died.
[Chris] Let's see. I think there's, we'll go take one last question if that's OK with you.
OK, so, this one's a history question from John, today we have seen no mention of the auklets in the
Destruction Island log books or from coasties stories likely that during Coast Guard years,
human habitat was a deterrent? Competition? [Eric] I don't know the answer to that. I hadn't heard that.
That's fascinating. I'll have to look that up.
I don't know.
I don't, I don't think, I don't think they were gone.
You know, I think there, they were. Probably there, maybe nobody cares.
I mean, my big cross to bear is that nobody cares about Rhino
auklets because they're not puffins even though they kind of are puffins.
But it's like that it's kinda drab gray birds that
only skulk around at night, and I'm like, they're really cool, trust me, it's like, why?
Yeah.
But auklets, that's a great tip, thank you, John. I wanna look that up and see why that, why that
might be. I mean, there's some interesting things with auklets.
So, there's some auklet colonies in California that,
where they hadn't been for awhile, or they just
showed up, fairly recently which I think in the past 15 or 20 years or so.
But, I haven't heard of that happening in Washington.
Right, yeah. I'll look that up.
[Chris] OK, well, thank you so much. I'll wrap us up here really quickly.
[Eric] Sure.
So thank you very much, Eric, for this
wonderful presentation. And thank you everyone that joined us.
Just wanted to make a little plug for some upcoming webinars that you're encouraged to join,
including one that Feiro and Olympic Coast will be co-hosting in April
with Anne Shaffer from Coastal Watershed Institute.
And to let you know that all of you that attended will get a certificate of attendance.
So that's worth one credit hour or contact hour professional development that will
come via e-mail.
And then just one last plug to ask you to please complete the survey. Again, because we are very
interested in what you have to tell us, especially about what you want to see in the future as well.
And yeah, thank you so much. And it will probably take about 2.5 to 3 weeks for all the closed
captioning, and so forth, to be completed. But then
this webinar will be posted on the National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series site.
Thank you so much.
[Grant] Excellent. Thank you, everybody, for joining in from Feiro. {Eric] Thanks a lot.
[Chris] Bye.