by Carl Safina
Increasingly frequent warm-water El Niño conditions are among the suite of intensifying climate changes of the last few decades. It’s not clear whether El Niño’s increasing frequency is related to the overall warming of the planet, but some scientists think it might be. Whether El Niños are intensified by global climate change or not, the conditions caused during El Niño events give us a good idea of what will happen throughout much of the oceans as the world continues warming.
Small temperature changes can have large effects. A mere two-degree Celsius increase in temperature in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Alaska since about 1980 has caused an 80 percent decline in planktonic animals. Every fish, bird, turtle, and mammal in the ocean feels that as it ripples up the food chain. Many eastern Pacific seabirds are starving or fleeing. Off California, the number of Sooty Shearwaters is down go percent, compared to a few years ago. Among other birds, the zooplankton-eating Cassin’s Auklet population has crashed by half, and fish-eating Common Murres are starving by the thousands along the west coast of North America. Alaskan salmon have been suffering a tremendous drop in numbers recently, too.
These effects are especially dramatic at the eastern margin of the sea, the waters of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska that form the main foraging range of Black-footed Albatrosses. Over the last decade, throughout all the northwest islands, their breeding numbers have been off by 10 percent or so. The number of nesting Laysans has dropped even more, from nearly 600,000 pairs to about 400,000. El Niño probably caused a food crisis for adults, but it doesn’t necessarily mean those albatrosses died. Most scientists believe those albatrosses simply skipped breeding because they couldn’t bulk up enough fat to come into reproductive condition. Now more than ever, the adults may be relying on their long-distance abilities to get to places in the ocean with food enough to keep them living. But even assuming they are alive, that’s a huge decline in eggs laid.
Other creatures are also moving in response to unusual temperature. Marlin that normally live off southern California are venturing as far north as Washington State. Numerous ocean fishes, plus birds and butterflies ashore, are extending their ranges north. They can; but slower-moving animals will have a harder time. Trees will likely have a very difficult time, though their pests and diseases appear more mobile. In the sea, coral reefs that are all dressed up but unable to go anywhere may have the hardest time coping.
Record high sea-surface temperatures are spreading worldwide, not just throughout the eastern Pacific, where the main ocean temperature changes can be pegged to El Niño. During recent years, tropical sea-surface temperatures have been the highest ever recorded, and the weather is causing the worst global coral die-off ever seen. Sixteen percent of the world’s coral reefs are suffering extensive mortality. In certain places in the Indian Ocean, nearly all the corals—some of them hundreds of years old—are dying or “bleaching” white, which can be a precursor to death. In lab experiments, a five-degree Celsius increase in water temperature shut off 60 percent of coral reproduction; two additional degrees stopped corals from breeding entirely. The U.S. Department of State says, “The geographic extent, increasing frequency, and regional severity of mass coral-bleaching events are likely a consequence of steadily rising marine temperatures, driven by human-caused global warming.”
Albatrosses can’t move their nesting islands to a cooler part of the ocean, so they skip breeding to remain alive. But even if it’s only temporary, the present reduction in breeding will produce in the population a hole whose effects will ripple through for decades.
In New Zealand, temperatures warmed by about one degree Celsius (about two degrees Fahrenheit) during the twentieth century. Even this seemingly trivial change has killed albatrosses. Adults nesting at a colony called Taiaroa Head have died from extreme heat coupled with lack of wind. Low humidity at hatching dries the egg membranes, making it difficult for chicks to leave their shells. The warmer conditions have allowed a parasitic blowfly to become established, and this fly sometimes kills hatchlings. Even the dried-out soil there now makes it harder for the birds to construct nests. Such are the seemingly subtle yet abundantly troublesome effects of very small climate changes.
New York Times science writer emeritus William K. Stevens has written, “There is no clearer consequence and signal of global warming than rising seas.” He calls sea-level rise “the dipstick of climate change.” Here at Tern Island and on many of the world’s coasts, only a few feet make the difference between land and sea. This was demonstrated back in 1969, when tremendous ocean waves struck French Frigate Shoals in the dark of night, washing completely over Tern Island, demolishing much of the station and its electronic equipment, and sending the desperate military men to the roof, where a New Zealand ship’s helicopter rescued them and their three dogs. The best estimate for sea-level rise during this century is twenty inches; the minimum estimate is half a foot. If Earth warms as projected, about three dozen small-island nations will find much of their territory drowned by an increasingly land-hungry ocean. Tens of millions of people in low-lying areas and on islands would likely need to flee. Maybe those people could find other countries. These birds—where would they go? Any higher islands would be increasingly populated by human refugees from lower lands, and thus less available to seabirds than even now. Where could they go? Finding the islands unsuitable, albatrosses would likely do what they often do—merely skip breeding. But they would do so in droves. And what will happen to future numbers after too many years of skipped breeding? Hawaii’s wonderful seabird colonies and the great nations of albatrosses would mostly be sifted into the sea.
Even for albatrosses on high islands in the most unpeopled expanses of Earth, the implications are great. In the Antarctic, whales, penguins, and many of the Southern Ocean’s Black-browed Albatrosses rely heavily on shrimplike krill. Young krill require the underside of sea ice for grazing algae; without it, they starve—their life cycle breaks. But the ice they need is melting at unprecedented rates. Another unexpected consequence: we’ve seen that with El Niño’s heat we also lose a lot of the breezes over vast reaches of ocean. One unexpected surprise of planetary warming is wind change. In coming years some normally windy places may experience less wind, and some normally calmer places may suffer more hurricanes. Five leading albatross researchers have written, “Use of wind by albatrosses has led to the selection of an extreme flight strategy that could only have evolved in the windiest place on earth. The changes in wind regime and variability that are predicted to occur with future changes in the world climate may inevitably impair the foraging ability of species relying so closely on predictable wind.” More than two centuries ago, Coleridge had intuited the exceptionally tight relationship between albatrosses and wind by linking the death of “the bird that made the breeze to blow” to a consequent calamity on a sea becalmed. It may be that we will instead harm “the breeze that made the bird to fly.” In the greenhouse world, the future of wind itself has fallen into question, and with it, the future of albatrosses.
Most of the world’s current warming is being caused by our use of carbon-based fuels. We all cause part of the problems facing albatrosses and corals and other ocean wildlife by the things we burn to fire human survival, industry, and pleasures—our lust for combustion. And, of course, more people means more burning. We’ve passed the six-billion mark, and all projections indicate that we’ll continue to be fruitful until we number ten or eleven billion souls. Ninety million new people join our planet each year. Think of adding over one hundred cities the size of New York each decade.
Earth is already reaching its life-support limits in cropland, fish, water, and atmospheric stability, not to mention what’s happening to wildlife habitat. How can we hope to satisfy the needs—and the wants—of all the hopeful people who will soon join us for dinner and who will all aspire to a decent standard of living? So much soil is under human cultivation and so much land under human occupation that agricultur
e and urbanization now annually take up an estimated 35 to 40 percent of all potential plant growth on land. People already use a tremendous amount of the world’s annual production budget. What will happen to wildlife whose land and livelihoods we further usurp?
The single largest effect an ordinary person can exert on nature is to have a child. That’s especially true if you’re American, because Americans’ use of energy and natural resources is extraordinary. Billions of children will be born in other countries, too, both richer and poorer, and they will all also need water to drink, food to eat, fuel to burn, and land to call home. They will also have dreams and aspirations. The most compassionate, hopeful thing we could do for our children and their world would be to ensure they are wanted and loved and provided for and that their numbers will allow them to manage, share, and promote peace in the world they will inherit. But even the loving thoughtfulness of voluntary family planning has proven too much of a challenge—rendered impossible for the most desperate by lack of information and education, turned into a battleground by certain religious and political ideologues, distorted into gender warfare, distrusted as some kind of covertly attempted class genocide. That is a great tragedy and an enormous moral mistake, because the weight of human overpopulation exacerbates virtually every problem people suffer, from health to hostilities. We have just begun to pay for this lack of vision, but the full costs will become increasingly severe and increasingly clear for humanity’s next two generations and for the other members of the family of life on Earth.
BY THE END OF THIS SEASON, only half the Black-footed nests and fewer than one in ten Laysan nests will survive to produce chicks old enough to fly. In a season this deadly, natural selection is applying itself with a vengeance. But is it still really “natural” if human-caused global warming is involved?
At such a time, age and experience count for a lot. Fortunately, Amelia has both abundantly. She knows much of the North Pacific like she knows the tops of her webbed feet. Not all the albatrosses equal her accumulated acumen for survival. By the porch steps where her chick sits, Amelia’s nearest neighbors are remembered only by their abandoned egg still in its nest, bleaching in the sun.
But the survivors are miracle enough. Those chicks still alive don’t know how lucky they are. They know only their hunger and that they await the mysterious appearance of certain adults who will feed them, whose whereabouts they can scarcely imagine.
Nor can we. But we have the satellites.
AMELIA’S LAST TRIP, by far the longest and most profitable since the chick hatched, stabilized her loss of weight and her condition. This next time she stays at sea only two days, never traveling more than 120 miles from Tern Island.
It’s the beginning of a rhythm she’ll set up for the rest of the time she’s feeding the chick: a very long trip to care for herself, then a very short trip for the chick, while she lets herself lose more weight. Amelia’s alternation of short and long trips is a common albatross parenting strategy. When the chicks are very small they can’t store a lot of food and must be fed frequently or they’ll starve. So the parents make short trips. Then suddenly—often abruptly—they start making much longer trips. Short trips are better for the chicks. Longer ones are better for the parents because they can go to places farther away where food is more abundant and they can regain some of their body weight.
The satellite tracks may also be providing a major clue about why Laysan Albatrosses outnumber Black-footeds by ten to one: they are using the ocean differently, and Laysans are using much more of it, foraging over a much larger portion of the Pacific. Most Laysans, like Amelia, are going generally north and west from their Hawaiian breeding grounds. They seem to know how to use the big frontal zones and the edges of oceanic currents and deep seamounts at the most extreme remove from any glimpse of distant land. This gives the Laysans a truly vast main foraging area, stretching across the temperate and subarctic North Pacific. The Black-footeds are more specialized, going mainly northeast from Hawaii toward mainland North America. They often slide over the narrow North American continental shelf, prowling the Gulf of Alaska, coastal British Columbia, and the waters off Washington, Oregon, and California. There, the outlines of distant shores and forested mountains come into sight. For people on those shores gazing seaward, the view suggests the immensity of the ocean that stretches over so many horizons. But few people sense the presence of the unseen albatrosses that are usually not very far away.
Amelia’s Travels March 16-April 14
In fact, one transmittered Black-footed Albatross has gone right to the Golden Gate Bridge and is hanging around San Francisco. Dave Anderson is dumbfounded. He reports, “When I saw where that bird is, the connectedness between these birds from these isolated islands and what we do in urban North America really hit me for the first time. That was another real moment for me; seeing something never understood before—something no one had any idea of.”
ON MARCH 16 Amelia is off again. She goes only a few miles north, then northwest of Tern Island. At the outset, nothing about the look of this trip suggests it will be a long one. But Amelia is just gathering her courage, or her will. Whatever albatrosses gather, she gathers enough of it to suddenly head north with breathtaking conviction. She flies a nearly straight twelve hundred miles essentially nonstop, until she crosses the subarctic front. She’s wasted little time getting back to the region she was in a few days ago, scant time dillydallying on the island slopes or seamounts. Her position is now about 42° north latitude, 166° west longitude. She’s in a very chilly place, and it’s still a nasty time of year. Near-constant winds whip the sea into fierce gray-green rolling mountains. Her wings, taut as a bow, quiver in the blasting gusts. When the wind blows from the north, the air is so cold it seems hard. Amelia loves this weather and this wind. It’s as though she’s reminded again that this—not the blistering tropics—feels like home.
Here she begins foraging heavily all day and part of the night, along the cold side of the frontal zone. For a week she continues working upcurrent, looping and meandering westward, to the international date line and way, way past it, performing the squids’ aerial burials.
When she needs a break from feeding, she wanders south for a few days into the calmer North Pacific Current, before her appetite takes her back up to Chow Town. Amelia’s looping track indicates that her luck has landed her back on Squid Row, and that she is savoring success. This feeding should increase her weight and maintain her health.
Amelia has worked her way deep into the open ocean, very far from Tern Island—she’s twenty-one hundred miles from her nest. Again she can feel the pull of that chick, and she breaks out of the front and begins a long, nearly straight sail eastward, continuing in the direction of morning through five dawns and darks.
When she has navigated herself eastward back to a position due north of Tern, she hangs a right and makes a three-day, fourteen-hundred-mile sprint for home. Her return track parallels her outbound route so closely you’d think she was looking at a map.
Altogether, she’s spent twenty-nine days at sea, covering seventy-six hundred miles. Finally, on April 14, she and her now much larger chick exchange calls and a major delivery of concentrated food, under Tern Island’s tropical sun. The chick, having neither eaten for two weeks nor had any fluid except a little rainwater, is at its limits of health, on the verge of trouble. It takes all the food Amelia has and, feeling a bit stronger because of it, demands more. Somehow the chick’s condition makes an impression on Amelia. The last trip was for her health. The next trip will be for the chick.
AMELIA LEAVES AGAIN, the very same day she arrived from her monumental journey to the frigid north. This next trip is perfunctorily short: forty-eight miles to the northwest for a few quick kid’s snacks, then home to baby—all the same day.
Amelia’s chick must be confused by a mother who can alternately abandon him for a month, then leave and return the very same day. A chick can have no concept of what its parents are
doing. The parents are gone, then suddenly they’re there with food. The chicks’ thoughts probably can’t even extend as far as the water that will be their whole world if they’re lucky enough to survive. Whatever Amelia’s chick thinks, at the moment it feels only one thing: full. No hunger. No thirst. Good.
Satisfied with the chick’s health and her own, Amelia rests at Tern Island, dozing in the sun, lulled by the restful racket of the thousands of other seabirds.
SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, Amelia vanishes—as if half a day’s rest was too much. It’s April 15, tax day across America. Amelia fits the national work ethic. Once again she hits the North Pacific’s major food locker, works her way along the front, then travels even farther north than on her last long trip, until she nears the edge of the continental slope south of the Aleutian Islands. Twenty-one hundred miles of ocean separate her from her chick—and she’s just gotten here.
Amelias Travels April 14 - 29
Now the cold and storms and buffeting winds are at least compensated by spring’s rapidly lengthening days. Daylight spans fourteen hours, and the temperature has lost its bitterest edge, though wet snow squalls roll through repeatedly. The first long-lining boats of the Alaskan spring are venturing into their hazardous work, wrenching Sablefish from their bottom habitats. Export to Japan’s lucrative, insatiable market drives this effort, as it does so many others in the sea.
Eventually Amelia penetrates almost far enough north to join the long-liners for a few days. Most of the work is undignified; squabbling with hundreds of fulmars and gulls for heads and guts. But the pay can be good, often worth elbowing her way through the deafening throngs.
