Animals Affected by Climate Change: How Seabirds Reveal the Hidden Impacts of Warming Oceans

1:00:00 Most of us see seagulls on the beach fighting over fries and think, "Ah, they're just noisy trash birds." But what if I told you those same seabirds are warning us about the entire health of the ocean? In a new study, scientists have discovered that these seabirds aren't just the victims of climate change, they're the messengers, and their story reveals how fragile marine ecosystems really are. We're going to find out more about this study on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action.

1:00:45 On today's episode, I've got such a cool episode for you. We're going to be talking about seabirds and a new study that's entitled, "Ecosystems Mediate Climate Impacts on Northern Hemisphere Seabirds." That's a lot to take in, I know. But I've got Dr. Helen Kline, who's here today to break us all down for us and just kind of tell us where seabirds are telling us a story. A story of suffering. A story that's saying, "Hey, you know what? This ecosystem isn't right." When I was growing up in Ontario, seabirds weren't exactly on my radar. I'd see seagulls every once in a while, and they would be eating trash on the ground, whatever's in the trash can, or sometimes it would take fries right out of kids' hands, depending on where they are.

1:01:27 They were cunning, they were smart, and they were hungry. But then I went out to the west coast, and I saw these seagulls, same type of species it looked like, and these skulls are just massive. They're big, and they're white, and they're beautiful, and it's powerful at that. It's nothing like the ones I see picking up trash inside Ontario, and that moment stuck with me. It reminded me of how much this ocean has a story. We miss this story because we're only seeing the small human-alerted part of it. So when my friend Annette sent me a paper about seabirds and their suffering with climate change, and how the prey that's in the ocean that they feed on is really important to be diverse, is really the important part of this and how we can actually keep seabirds, which are like the canary in the coal mine literally telling us how our ocean health is, maintaining that ocean health.

1:02:20 I was pretty excited to interview Helen Kaelene. This interview was really, really memorable to me because I realized how important it is to talk about all parts of the ocean and how the connection between birds that are flying high in the sky and the ocean is so, so important. So we're going to find out today not only how birds are affected by climate change, how their prey is affected by climate change, and how diversity really helps stabilize these predators, these top predators, which is basically like almost apex predators that are really, really important. So we're going to find out all of that. I've got resources for you in this episode. We're going to talk to Helen Kaelene. Here is my interview with Helen. Enjoy. And I will talk to you after.

1:03:01 Hey, Helen, welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Are you ready to talk about seabirds? I'm ready. Let's go. All right. I'm excited because, as I mentioned before, before we start recording, I don't get to talk about seabirds a lot. One, because I'm not an expert in seabirds. I don't really know a lot about seabirds. And so I'm super excited when this paper kind of came across my email. A friend of ours, Annette, she kind of like was like, Hey, you know what? I've got a great paper for you to discuss on how to protect the ocean. I was like, Yes, let's do it. And then we got introduced and we kind of got to know each other through this. And I'm super excited to hear about a recent paper that you published with some colleagues called Ecosystems Mediate Climate Impact on Northern Hemisphere Seabirds.

1:03:46 This is something I feel like is really important as climate change is kind of hitting everything that is around us. We don't we talk a lot about fish moving north and distribution shifting, but we're not talking a lot about how that's affecting seabirds, especially with warming oceans and so forth. So I'm looking forward to talking all about this. But before we do, let's get to know you a little bit more. Why don't you tell us a little bit of who you are and what you do. Yeah. So thanks so much for having me on the podcast. It's really exciting to be here. Yeah. As you said, my name is Helen Killeen. I currently am working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife as a science policy specialist on fisheries work.

1:04:27 But my this paper was one of the products out of my postdoc, which I did at the Farallon Institute and Farallon Institute is a small nonprofit that does all kinds of really, really cool ecosystem scale research with a particular focus on marine predators like seabirds. We have a long history of working with seabirds and trying to understand how climate and fishing and other human activities can impact marine ecosystems broadly and then how to how to conserve or how to respond to those impacts. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, it's it's really neat work.

1:05:09 So before that, I did my PhD at UC Davis completed my PhD in marine ecology in 2022. And before that, I was actually doing something totally different. I was working as a science teacher and then had a brief stint as a at a pizza shop. So I've done a lot of different things. But yeah, that's yeah, it's been a winding path. But I've been really lucky to find myself in a super fulfilling and exciting career. That's amazing. And I got to dive a little deeper into this because we don't get a lot of teachers turned scientists or science teachers turn even more science and getting into into research.

1:05:51 Did you always have a love for birds because usually people who study birds are pretty into birds like their birders that like they go out hiking and looking for birds. They've got this little blood little black book or a little book where they write down all the birds and where they were and stuff like that. Were you always you always have an interest in in birds in particular? I wish that I could say yes. I know I I was not one of those people. I was not one of those like bird fanatics. But I have so many friends who are bird fanatics and I really, really sympathize with them. Birds are so cool. They're like these, you know, amazing, unique gems that just kind of like fly into your life and then fly out.

1:06:36 Yeah, so I can I can really understand the attraction to birds. But no, I was not like a big bird fanatics before. I like that. I like that because, you know, not everybody has to be a bird or just a study bird. So you can be interested in it, but you don't you may have other other hobbies and stuff like that, which I like. I think that's I think that's wonderful. Now you you said you were a science teacher. Was that when you were younger, was that what you wanted to do growing up? Like I want to be a teacher like this is what I want to do. Yeah. So coming out of college, I was I was feeling torn between several different career paths and and teaching is something I've always really cared about and thought about deeply and really been interested in.

1:07:20 And so I became a high school teacher out of college chemistry, physics and biology. Why high school? Why high school? I think because I like the science at that level. Oh, okay. So much that you can like do and say and I also really like that age group. It's it's really fun to work with. I love that. My daughter wants to become a teacher. She's hitting more towards the primary grades. And I'm just like, we need good high school, like solid high school teachers like, you know, like, you know, and I think that's like that that new generation that's coming up. You see a lot of them wanting to go elementary and I'm like, oh, you got to go high school. Like, you know, I always like to see that. I mean, across the board, I think like teachers are some of the most impactful people. Oh, yeah. Period. So yeah, yeah.

1:08:06 One of the most difficult professions, I think to do on a regular, I know everybody's like, oh, you get the summers off and you get this and you get that. But I'm like, I've seen classrooms. I've done, you know, I've done presentations in classrooms before. And it's I have a new or I've always had a respect for what teachers have to put up with. And of course, class size is getting bigger and bigger. And that becomes a like, I can't do that. I can't even say how much of a challenge more of a challenge that is as class sizes get bigger and so forth. But the impact that they have, they're there for what, six, seven hours a day, maybe eight hours a day. But like, at least in front of kids for hours and hours on end, impacting everything they learn and how they like see life and things like that.

1:08:48 So I just think that's awesome. What was your favorite subject to teach? Was it chemistry or biology or physics or what did you get to teach that was like the most memorable? I think we probably had the most fun in physics because we just did a lot of like crazy good stuff and the students were able to I taught mostly juniors and seniors. Okay. And they were able to just do a lot of explorations themselves. And that was really fun to be part of. But I like teaching all the classes. That's and I've taught some some college level courses since then. And it continues to be something that I care a lot about.

1:09:29 That's great. Now, you pivoted going more towards research. What brought that on to make that that's a big that's a big thing like like teachers. I don't know what I live in Canada. So I don't know what teachers like what the profession is like. In the US but but in Canada that you're like you get to be a teacher. You're on a path to be set. You know pension all that kind of stuff is there. It is a pretty good like solid career and profession to be with as you retire. You can retire early and so forth. Just like a government official. But you know what made you pivot to go into more I guess research based from from being a teacher.

1:10:11 Yeah. So I was sort of saying that I felt really torn about different career paths coming out of college. And you know, there was part of me that really wanted to work in conservation and environmental research and understanding nature and working to protect nature. It was like something that I also cared deeply about and working to working to protect nature in a way that benefited society. Right. So I think after after a while I was like I want to go back to graduate school and see where that goes. And I've been lucky enough that throughout graduate school and after I've always found ways to kind of still incorporate teaching into how I spent my day.

1:10:57 I can imagine I can only imagine it never really gets out of you once you get that teaching in you. But you're still making a big change in career going from something that's paying you you know like a pretty good salary to graduate work which is quite the difference. That's a big decision to make. Were you ever torn in terms of like do I do it now? Like how long were you teaching before you did it and was that a difficult decision to go back to graduate school? That's a really good question. Okay, so cut. So I taught high school for two years, which I don't think was long enough for me to really understand how nice it is to have like a really stable salary. Right. Right.

1:11:37 But so I don't I don't think that featured too much in the decision making for me. One thing that I have tried to tell students that I've mentored a lot is is that in the sciences, we're really lucky in graduate school and that most of the graduate or many graduate programs you can be you can get paid to do them or get them at least partially paid for. And I was lucky enough to find a PhD that you know paid my salary, paid my tuition, paid my health insurance. So it made it possible. Yeah, yeah, huge. Yeah. And then when you started to apply to grad school, did you have an idea of what type of like topic you were going?

1:12:21 Did you go right into a PhD? Yeah, I went straight into a PhD. I did not do a Masters. Yeah, and then so like doing that, it's it's you know, just finding your topic and finding like an interest. What made you was it? It was on seabirds. So what made you go or was it on? Sorry, was it on seabirds? Was it on seabirds? Was it on seabirds? Or was it like another marine topic? No, it was different. Yeah, it was, you know, like seabirds are these like big, like beautiful, charismatic creatures. My PhD, my doctoral research was on larval fishes and blinkton. Yeah, so it was like, you know, zoom way down to the side of like a hangnail or something like that. I was studying those organisms. So what made you like go towards that route?

1:13:11 Yeah, yeah. Okay, so when I, you know, I was broadly interested in doing some related to the environment, specific more specifically than that, I'd been really captured by some of the coursework I did and some of the internships that I did in college to focus on like ocean issues. And one when I was in college, one of the like big topics was marine spatial planning. This was in the during the Obama administration. Yes, yes. Marine spatial planning was this huge deal. And one of the big questions involved in marine spatial planning was, you know, how do you sort of optimize different human use of the oceans spatially so that you get these, you know, environmental and ecosystem benefits. One of them being that, you know, in California, for instance, we've got this network of marine protected areas that spans the whole state.

1:14:08 This place we've set aside these places as being you, you know, you can't fish here, you can't do anything here. And some places you can do a little bit of fishing, but not commercial fishing. They have different sort of rules associated with them. But when the when that spatial plan was set up, one of the things that they took into consideration was where do we put these places so that the larvae that are produced by the populations of animals that live within these protected areas make connections between the protected areas and create this network effect of organisms moving between protected areas and from protected areas into fishable areas.

1:14:48 So that was one of the big questions is how do you sort of optimally do marine spatial planning? Can I say something? Just to interrupt. So I did a Masters on marine conservation up in Nova Scotia. And one of the things was my Masters is more of like the GIS aspect like mapping out, not demersal fish, there was a biologist who demersal fish. But also I did macro invertebrates crabs, fish, shrimps, crab shrimps, lobster. And we were looking at like, what are the representative areas? Like what kind of assemblages are there? And so I did that.

1:15:28 But my PhD was going to be if I did it was going to be on connectivity. So it was awesome. Yeah, for the for the Scotian shelf and Newfoundland. So, so cool. Yeah, yeah, I never ended up happening. But but that was that was on that was the direction. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's exactly what I'm trying to describe here is basically like how does how does connectivity among spatial spatial plan work and how do you do that? So I was lucky enough to get connected to my graduate advisor, Stephen Morgan, who was doing exactly that kind of research that you gave us. And, yeah, I worked with him to do some collections across the shelf of larval fishes at a whole bunch of different depths and identify all of them and try to infer what what kind of behaviors they might be using to to move during their larval, during throughout their level stage.

1:16:29 That's awesome. So you got to do field, you got to do laboratory work, you know, eyes in a microscope quite a bit, I assume. And then you got to do like the stat statistical analysis. That's a complete kind of PhD that love that. I love that. Yeah, I filled out the whole bingo card. Yeah, well, it's true. Not a lot of people did. Like when I did mine, I had like a database of multi year kind of data. So you didn't really have to do, you know, like the go out in the field. I had a lot of field experience before that. But but that. Yeah. So that's cool. You got to do. You got to do it all. I love that that aspect. And now you did you went for your PhD. Now some people do multiple postdocs. Did you do multiple or did you do one like where this paper came out? Like, yeah, this I did one postdoc. And then and then moved recently earlier this year into my new position with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is amazing. We'll talk about that. Just a second. That's awesome. Now the paper that you did was this were there like when you did the research that she did during your postdoc was this.

1:17:32 One of the only papers or were there other papers that came out associated with this? Yeah, so there are multiple papers that came out of this study, which is a grant funded by the National Science Foundation to look to try to better understand seabirds broadly across all these different breeding sites around the world. Yeah. We have multiple papers. So this is the first paper of several that will come out on all those data sets. So it's like the introduction of what we're learning here. Now, I have to ask. And this might sound like an abrupt question. I don't mean to make a sound like that. Why should we care about seabirds? You know, everybody's always like, you know, everybody loves whales. Some people like birds. Some people don't. There's a there's a lot of there are a lot of people who don't like birds out there. Tell them what they're doing.

1:18:22 There tell me why from from an ecosystem perspective, why people who are listening to this podcast scientists, non scientists, whoever should care about seabirds. Yeah, okay. Well, I'll give you three reasons to care about seabirds. Love it. So first of all, you know, I think most of our collective experience of seabirds certainly I grew up in Colorado and that's not by the coast at all. So my experience of seabirds was very limited. So my life. But we think about seabirds as basically being like seagulls on the beach trying to steal your sandwich or like rummaging through the dump or something like that. But even that little brief glimpse that we get of goals is a really limited picture of their amazing life history and their like the amazing ways that they spend their time and make their living in the world.

1:19:17 So first reason that people should really care about seabirds is that seabirds are amazingly diverse. They make their living on the oceans in ways that are incredibly challenging and awe inspiring. They conduct migrations over, you know, across hemispheres over huge expanses. They mark the seasons in many cultures. There are societies and indigenous cultures that have a lot of different cultures. There are indigenous cultures that have lived off of seabirds seasonally. So there's a lot of amazing kind of just like awe inspiring reasons to be interested in seabirds.

1:19:58 Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I feel like you mentioned the gulls and now I live just outside Toronto and you see gulls who are like, you know, they're they're living off of like garbage, you know, they're scavenging for food and they're kind of small. You know, some are gray and some like they don't look as nice and people are like all their garbage birds like around here. That's the law of times when you see and we see them so much, right? I recently went out to the west coast this past May to see a seagull that is from the west coast that literally lives off the ocean and like the fish and the food off the ocean. The size difference and the beauty is so different like the ones on the west coast and I've even been to the Arctic to and you see them in the Arctic and even on the east coast like anywhere near the ocean. They're big, they're cleaner, they're fuller.

1:20:48 They're like the difference is like I don't even know I would love to see a study of like what the weight differences and if it's different like different types of species, but it is night and day when you see that. So even seagulls that were very used to, we kind of consider them as like scavengers and garbage birds. There are gorgeous along the coast. Yeah, it's a difference. You know what I mean? It's really, it's always really exciting to me to see an animal in the environment that it was evolved to, you know, be in. It's amazing to see that and that includes goals that we associate with. Yeah, it's kind of like dirty gross pest behaviors, but yeah, but you know, thinking beyond goals like, you know, there's albatross, there's shearwaters, there's all kinds of amazing, you know, there's these tiny little petrels that dance on the surface of the water and grab that little zooplankton.

1:21:41 Like there's this huge diversity of birds out there. And I think that's something that, you know, many of us just kind of like miss out on. So they're worth caring about intrinsically. Yes. And maybe I'll just make like a little pitch to folks listening to the podcast we have if you go to ferrallandinstitute.org, there's a little banner at the top that directs people to seabirds.ferrallandinstitute.org. And if you go to that page, you can have a look at a huge diversity of seabirds and spend a little bit of time learning about their life history, their the way that they breed, where they're located, who studies them and and kind of dig into all of that. If you find that interesting.

1:22:29 We are going to link to it. I just I just I just clicked on it. And it's like an interactive site to find it. This is awesome. Yeah, we're I'm gonna I'll link to it in the show notes so people can take a look. This is definitely something that I'm going to do. This is definitely something you should take a look at that first image of seabirds diving in to get the fish is pretty cool like diving into the ocean is very, very cool. Yeah, this is awesome. Now let's talk let's talk about the paper. This is this is an important paper that came out nature communications, or it's an environment called ecosystems mediate climate impacts on northern hemisphere seabirds. So looking at climate impacts on seabirds. Can we talk just a little bit of how this paper kind of came into existence like the idea of it was it based off of what you guys were like, was it a plan thing?

1:23:16 You know, as you go through the grant and you're doing all these studies, you're taking all these measurements, are we looking like how like we're gonna look at how climb is looking at seabirds, but different populations in the Pacific in the North Atlantic and in the South Atlantic. I mean, that's a big thing to do. How did this whole idea kind of come into play? Yeah. Good question. So I'll kind of wrap that together with reasons two and three that you should care about seabirds are and it's kind of like the intro to that next question. Yeah. So one of the things that seabird researchers and marine researchers in general have learned is that you can get a lot of information about the health of the ocean by looking at top predators and how top predators are faring.

1:24:06 Seabirds are often considered to be sentinel species in that they're kind of like the canaries in the coal mine of an ecosystem. We can look to seabirds and their performance on a number of different metrics to try to understand how the rest of the ecosystem is doing. And it's a little easier to look at seabirds because they're above the ocean. You can go to a colony and count them. You can pick up their chicks and measure how fat they are and see what they're eating and all kinds of those kinds of things. So sentinel seabirds are this really uniquely useful sentinel species group of species to understand how the ocean is doing and how it's changing and how ecosystems are responding to climate.

1:24:57 So back in 2021, Bill Seidman and other colleagues at the Farallon Institute published this paper in science where they looked at hemispheric asymmetry in the breeding productivity of seabirds around the world. So in an earlier version of the data set that's published in this paper that we're talking about today, what they found is that seabirds in the northern hemisphere, their breeding productivity and their probability of breeding failure. Well, I guess I should say, their breeding productivity is in decline and the probability of breeding failure is going up in the northern hemisphere faster than in the southern hemisphere.

1:25:42 Interesting. And they, you know, they suggested a lot of reasons for why that might be happening. This paper is kind of a follow up where we've expanded the number of time series that we look at. And we instead of looking at hemispheric asymmetry, we sort of zoom in on, you know, are there particular ecosystems throughout the northern hemisphere where birds are feeling better than others or worse than others and why, why might that be what might be driving that? Interesting. So the first so the first paper figured out that something's going on within the hemispheres, then you guys dove deeper into the hemisphere where they're like the north, the North Atlantic like that, that area and the Pacific where they weren't doing as well. Is that?

1:26:27 Yeah, we were looking to understand, you know, at a finer scale than just north versus south. Right. Can we look at these different ocean basins and start to see patterns? In that sense, I'm putting my science hat on here in that sense. Are you looking at the same bird species across different habitats? Is that what you're looking at? Yeah, so that's another one of the things that makes this this paper and the earlier one so exciting is that we have 100 in this this most recent version, we've got 138 data sets from the northern hemisphere. And more than that, if you include the southern hemisphere where we also have data and there's going to be research published on that pretty soon. But just looking at the northern hemisphere 138 data sets time series of birds doing better or worse every year.

1:27:20 And that represents 39 species. Okay. And that's the most exciting thing about the data. That's right. Yeah, it's this huge resource to pull information out of and that's one of the most exciting things about the data. Well, I should say too is like for the audience members like normally when you get a data set, it's five years, four or five years, three years if you're lucky because it costs a lot of money to do these monitoring programs to get something that expands over decades. It's super exciting for researchers to have like that is that's like getting like a sugary cereal every once in a while. You get it? You're like, this is awesome. Like this is this is really good. We'll get a lot of data out of this. You know what I mean?

1:28:04 Yeah, totally. I and I think like, you know, that highlights another one of the parts of this whole experience that I have loved the most is for this paper, we have 56 different authors and they're from 12 countries throughout the northern hemisphere. So like this huge data set has been the product of scientists all over the world going out to these tiny islands or these remote places and spending their years of their life monitoring these particular seabird colonies. And so, you know, again, if you go to that website, you scroll all the way to the bottom, you can see field notes stories from the field of these these different places around the world and get a sense for what it's like to be a seabird researcher on these far places.

1:28:54 And sometimes like in the middle of the ocean where thousands of miles from the nearest person. Oh, yeah. And so all of that is kind of brought together to help tell us about what's going on throughout the northern hemisphere throughout the world. But I think it's a it's really a celebration of of all the hard one data that these people all around the world, these people who really care about seabirds care about the health of our oceans have been able to bring together. It's incredible. Like this site is incredible, too. Like you've got like all the data on each on each of the the birds and you know, you got all the data in there. You look at the field sites and stuff. This is really, really cool.

1:29:37 We don't see this often from from like like a big project like this really showing, you know, everything that's going on, even having like field notes, you know, to to get people's ideas of what's happening and what they're going through and what they're experiencing in different parts of the world and what they're seeing. I just think that's that's incredible. It's a really great piece. Whoever put this together. I guess it's the Fairland Institute, but unreal to be able to do this. This is this is really exciting to to have this. How did did your lab get to be a part of this whole project? Yeah, well, that's really that's an effort that's been led by my postdoc supervisor, Bill Seidenen, who founded the Fairland Institute. He is a like eminent seabird researcher.

1:30:28 He's done, you know, done an enormous amount of work on seabirds throughout his career and has these connections all around the world of people who have monitored different locations. Yeah. Bill himself has been heavily involved in monitoring off the California coast, including the at the Farallon Islands. But, you know, he's he's one of many seabird researchers who are in all these different places. And I think he and and others who have published meta analysis in recent years saw the need for this kind of integrative knowledge, this the synthesis of, okay, we know this is happening here. We think it's due to climate.

1:31:11 We know this is happening here. We think it's due to climate. What what can we see and learn differently if we bring all that information together to get the big picture. Amazing. So this first paper that comes out really exciting has some pretty alarming things that that were observed and that were that were revealed within this paper. Can you just kind of talk a little bit about some of those results? I just mentioned that we'll dive deeper into into each one. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I'll kind of walk through some of the key findings. So what we sought out to do is, you know, we've got all this data from throughout the northern hemisphere, we broke it up into seven different major ecosystems. So places like the Northwest Atlantic, you think like the eastern seaboard of the US into Canada, the northern your northern European seas, which is, you know, the northern sea.

1:32:05 The northern European seas, which is, you know, the north sea and sort of areas of northern Europe. The, the Northeast Pacific, including both the cold temperate areas and the warmer areas off of Baja Hawaii, the Arctic and then parts of the western side of the Pacific off of, you know, Korea, Japan, China. And so we looked at the different ecosystems around the world. And what we did was we looked at how our seabirds doing in each of these ecosystems through time, knowing that the climate is changing and that ecosystem responses to climate change and the rate of climate change. So, you know, the northern Europe may be doing one thing and the Pacific may be doing another thing. A lot of that has to do with things like, you know, here in off of California and in the Northeast Pacific, the rhythms of the ecosystem are really driven by things like El Nino and factors like that.

1:33:12 Whereas those features may not be as important in other parts of the world. So the ecosystems are sort of structured differently in different places, but we know the climate is changing. So what does all this mean for top predators? And we chose to look at one specific metric, which is seabird breeding productivity, or the number of chicks fledged per female per year at each breeding colony. And the reason we chose to look at that is because that is one metric that is reliably and consistently measured across many seabird colonies all around the world. So you're looking at the data sets and that's what they pretty much measure. Yeah. Okay.

1:33:53 Yeah. So they reliably, you know, it's measured kind of the same way everywhere you go. It's something that's like in the, you know, first step in the manual. Yeah. Each of these colonies, like they get that data. Yeah. And the other thing is that it tells us about the population dynamics going forward. It's not just what did they eat this year? It's like how many chicks are they producing? What does that mean for the population in the future? It's a bit of a predictor. It's a bit of a predictor. Yeah. So we also used data from about sort of ocean conditions in each of these seven different ecosystems. And unsurprisingly, using this, looking at the environment, we found that it's warming everywhere.

1:34:37 Right. If you kind of know that it's warming everywhere throughout the northern hemisphere. Yeah. Looking back across decades of records. But we found that, you know, at a community level, like many species of seabirds living in all these different places at a big scale. We're not seeing seabirds just like nose diving in terms of their breeding productivity across all seven ecosystems. We're seeing that we're seeing declines. It's statistically significant declines in the breeding productivity of seabirds in the Northwest Atlantic, in the Arctic and in Northern Europe. That's where we're seeing statistically significant declines in breeding productivity of seabirds.

1:35:25 And when you say Northern Europe, is this still on the Atlantic side or is that like in the North? Yeah, North. It's the North Atlantic. Like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So so we're seeing these three ecosystems where seabird productivity is declining. Like there are fewer babies per year. And we can see that in the data going back decades. We're not seeing that, though, is in places like in Hawaii and in the Northwest Pacific and in the Northeast Pacific. So basically, all of the Pacific, North Pacific, we're seeing more stability in the breeding productivity trends.

1:36:08 And that's in spite of sort of ubiquitous warming. Right. And one of the reasons why we might think for these things to be linked is that, you know, if you get warming seas, you get changing food conditions, like as things warm up, the phytoplankton changes. You might get phytoplankton later in the year or earlier in the year. It's mismatched in terms of its time with the zooplankton, with the forage fish, and then there's less available for the top predators. Right. Right. And it could have also move, like shifted based on currents, too. Yeah. Yep. You could see it. Yeah. So we kind of actually, we can kind of bundle all of that together. And we sort of expect that with warming conditions and climate change, we expect to see this either spatial or temporal mismatch between prey and predators. Right.

1:37:01 And that's something we can broadly expect to be the case across a lot of ecosystems, but we're seeing more stability in the Pacific across these decades of of seabird breeding productivity records than we're seeing in the North Atlantic in the Arctic where we're seeing, okay, yeah, seabirds are in decline in these places for sure. So that that's one of so it's, you know, it's warming everywhere. We're seeing seabird breeding productivity decline in some places, but not everywhere. Yeah. Another key finding was that in places where we see that the we're seeing a stronger link between warming and and other climate change metrics during the prebreeding season, then during other parts of the year. So one important thing to know here is that when seabirds breed, they come back to a colony to breed, right?

1:37:56 They don't just kind of like breed wherever they are. They all come back to one location. They find their partner, they lay an egg, and they they raise that egg until it fludges. The period of time from when the seabirds arrive at the colony to when that egg hatches conditions during that period seem to be really important for determining breeding success across ecosystems, including those ecosystems where we see greater stability in the Pacific. So, for example, you know, years where it's warm in the in the Northeast Pacific and in the Arctic, we see during the prebreeding season in particular, we see a decline in breeding success.

1:38:45 When waters are more stratified in the Northwest Atlantic during the prebreeding season, we see a bigger decline, a market decline in the seabird breeding productivity. So that like early part of their breeding season is kind of this critical period for determining the ultimate success. And just if you can just define stratification just for those who are not familiar with that term. Yeah. So, you know, if you picture like a whole water column from the surface down to the very bottom. Stratification is a term that we use to to describe how layered that water is. So if you're like back in your high school science class and you're putting vinegar on top of oil, they split, right?

1:39:31 Yeah, you've got the vinegar sitting on the oil sitting on top and the vinegar on the bottom. Mm hmm. So you get less dense solutions sit on top of more dense solutions. The same thing happens in the ocean. Dense, cold, salty water sits at the bottom and warm, lighter, fresher water sits at the top. Unless you get mixing, right? And if the water column gets mixed by storms or winds, then you can you kind of like shake up that solid dressing or whatever. Yep. But we expect, you know, we can see that stratification is more pronounced is the water columns more layered when the surface layer warms.

1:40:15 Right. So if it's getting warmer at the surface and, you know, this is one of the things that we expect to be a byproduct of climate change as the world warms, we expect the surface water to warm very quickly and it increases this resistance to mixing throughout the water column. And so we call that we we expect to see greater stratification through time with climate change. And there have been some really great papers looking at stratification trends around the world that have shown that across ocean basins, we are seeing a tendency for greater stratification. And so this for stratification, why would that matter for that period, you know, pre colony, like before the colony to, you know, basically the fledgling come out? Yeah. So there's a lot of different ways or there's several different ways that stratification could impact seabirds, including during the pre breeding season.

1:41:12 So for instance, you know, if you can picture kind of like warmer and colder water sitting separate to each other, you might see different fish species living in those different parts of the water column or different zooplankton living in the different parts of the water column. So if you've got if you're the view really if you're from a seabirds point of view, you really want to get the stuff that's in the cold salty deeper water, a very thick stratified layer warm layer at the top is going to make it harder for you to get down and get those course those fish. Yeah. So that's one one way that it could.

1:41:52 And I think that to expand on that, going back to my master's degree, one of the things I found so you know, you're looking at the North Atlantic, you're very it's very influenced by the Gulf Stream that comes up, you know, just outside of Nova Scotia. And I remember every once in a while you'll get these eddies that come off of the Gulf Stream, you know, go into off the the Scotian shelf. You know, you get that warm water, right? And then you get that dense cold water on the on the bottom, as if that's what kind of makes that that loop go across that we hear so much the North Atlantic loop.

1:42:40 It's just yeah, it's just a very interesting. That's what made it think that made me think about it. You look at that stratification. That gets more and more stratified. You're looking at some problems there. Yeah. Like that, that gradient between, you know, dense and lighter water is part of what drives these like vast ocean throughout the whole world. And so, you know, like thinking like really close to a colony or something stratification could impact the kinds of prey that's available. It could also impact, you know, the water quality, maybe the lighter, fresher water is more or less clear making it easier or harder for a diving seabird to visually track its prey.

1:43:29 And so, you know, the other thing that you kind of think might be going on in the Northwest Atlantic where we're seeing that relationship between stratification and breeding productivity is period years where there have been where there has been greater stratification are linked to one type of sort of ecosystem productivity like zooplankton and phytoplankton community. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that are going on in the Northwest Atlantic that are going to be a little bit more than in years where there's, you know, lower stratification. Right. And I think a lot of that has, you know, not being from the Northwest Atlantic and not knowing that system as well. A lot of that is driven by like freshwater inputs and it really changes the structure of the lower trophic levels of the community, which seabirds then like predate upon to feed their chicks.

1:44:23 Yeah, yeah. That's, that's, it's pretty heavy to really think about this now. Now, how much is it affecting like you're talking about the sort of the breeding capabilities, like how much of a decline are we seeing over the end and how fast are we seeing is it is it speeding up or is it still like a slow process? Yeah, it is. Well, it's a slow process, but it's still very remarkable that it's even detectable because we're talking about like, you know, dozens of species in these different systems. And you would think that like, okay, one might be doing better with climate change, one might be doing worse.

1:45:07 But in aggregate, we're seeing a statistically significant decline. And, you know, we tried to kind of create decades scale trends or estimates for how fast it's happening. And it across the different ecosystems, we're seeing declines, it's like from six to 11% per decade into in a decline in seabird breeding productivity, based on compared to the baseline. Right. And that's pretty remarkable. Like, you know, if you fast forward decades out that that's clearly an issue. And it going back to the Pacific for a second, where we've been talking about, okay, it's a little bit more stable. We're not seeing a record of decline.

1:45:52 We're very concerned about the fact that we may not see a decline yet, but we could very well reach tipping points where we start to see really marked declines. And we've seen that in recent years, like, you know, 2014 through 2016, we had this huge heat wave that affected their whole northeast Pacific. It was called the blob. Yeah, right. So that story, one of one of the things that happened during the blob, John Piot, a really great seabird researcher, published this paper documenting that, like half a million to over a million common mers died, presumably of starvation during the blob.

1:46:38 And that was in the north northeast Pacific, where we're saying that breeding success is kind of like stable. Right. But in recent years, we're seeing these like crazy things happen. And there's not been as much of a record of recovery in years since since the blob for the common population. So it's very like, it's very possible that in in the near future, we could start to see even these stable ecosystems take a decline. Yeah, I think that's interesting observation, where you're looking because we've seen this happen. And other systems where you don't notice it, you know, as a steady decline, but then all of a sudden, you know, population crashes or something happens, you know, we don't know what's what's going to happen if we keep losing the prey.

1:47:23 And we keep seeing changes or changes in the prey and changes in distribution of that prey. So that that becomes a very like it's almost like is that the question is the North Atlantic becoming a predictor for the Pacific. Yeah, right. Right. That's the that's what I that's what I'm kind of getting out of it. I'm like, oh, gosh, is this something that we have to be careful of, you know, in the in the Pacific because we don't want to we obviously want to help in the North Atlantic, which we'll get to in a bit. But then, you know, we look at the Pacific and it might be going through the precursor of these declines. I think that that's, you know, potentially fair to say that these these regions where we're seeing. Marked declines in breeding productivity could very easily be in the future for places where it's currently stable. Right.

1:48:12 Now, I know there were other with their other observations. I know that was like the like a big one, obviously. Were there other observations that you found like other key findings? Yeah. So another thing that we were really interested in is like, okay, so stepping back some places, seabirds are in decline. Some places their productivity is more stable. Why is that? Yeah, what's causing that? We know that these, like I said before, like these ecosystems are structured differently. Some of them are driven by multi decadal trends. Some of them may be driven by freshwater input. Some of them may be driven by fishing impacts or something like that. You know, they're different in many ways. But is there some sort of factor that can easily easily be driven by freshwater impacts?

1:48:57 Can easily easily explain these differences in seabird breeding productivity trends. And one of the things that we looked at was just what's the prey composition look like across these different ecosystems, knowing that having food to feed your yourself as a seabird parent and precondition your body for a successful reproductive cycle. And having the food to be able to feed your chicks so that they can successfully fledge and make it through their first year. That's critically important. We know the prey is super important during this period. So we we did a deep dive into documenting what are the top types of prey for each colony, each bird at each colony across all 138 data sets. And when we compare the prey community that is relied upon across these different seven ecosystems, we saw that the northern the North Atlantic, the Northwest Atlantic, the northern European seas and the Arctic tend to have lower prey diversity compared to the Pacific where we see sort of more more diverse prey on which seabirds are relying.

1:50:20 And we that's kind of important to know because if if we're seeing like, okay, these places where we've got a lot of diverse prey where seabirds have a portfolio of options to potentially choose from potentially prey switching within a particular species. Something about having a really diverse prey available makes that that ecosystem less vulnerable to sort of shift climate induced shifts at the predator level. In places like northern Europe where there's much, you know, seabirds are relying on all the same couple species to support their colonies.

1:51:00 Yeah. In particular, you know, sand lance is one one forage fish that we see being like, really important for many for many seabirds species. When sand lance goes down, then that affects a lot of different northern European seabirds. So there's this one link in the chain being pulled up. That's interesting. That's so interesting. Are there I mean, we're looking at different species, but I think that's a good thing. I mean, we're looking at two like significantly different habitats in like north, north Atlantic and Pacific.

1:51:40 Are there still similar food sources like similar food, like prey species that are similar between the Pacific and the North. Are they quite different? Yeah. So I think that's a good question. So they are different species, but I think you can kind of like group them into being OK. Yeah, there's there. There are lots of sort of small silvery fish that you rely on. Right. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. The species may be different, but yeah, they're all kind of like generally the same thing. Small silvery fish that you can fit in your bill. Gotcha. Are they affected by, you know, some are more maybe some of those prey species are just a little bit more stable. I'm thinking like, you know, in the Pacific, I think it's like anchovies and sardines are doing very fairly well. Is that my understanding or am I is the opposite now? I remember there's a big management practice in the especially in California for those for those fisheries.

1:52:36 And they're I think they're trying to stabilize or even they're growing. Please clarify. I'm trying to think it off my head. No, that's okay. So yeah. So sardine and anchovy have been alternating for OK for many periods. And the state has tried to work that into its management strategies. Gotcha. That's OK. If we know one's up and maybe we don't hit the other one so hard or something like that. Right. There's there is basically just more prey redundancy in the Pacific. Rather than it just being sand plants and two or three other species, it's like a dozen different forage fish and then it's zooplankton and then it's invertebrates that can be relied on by, of course, you know, different species specialize on different seabirds specialize on different prey. But I have a big ecosystem scale. There's a lot more prey redundancy in the Pacific than there is in the North Atlantic. And we think that's a big part of explaining what's going on.

1:53:35 Yeah. So having a more diverse sort of meal ticket, I guess, or menu for these for these predators, the better it is, the more stable those colonies would be. I guess, right? Yeah. They have a more diverse portfolio to pull from. So when when things get really hot or really warm or really stratified or or whatever it is, that's driving change in the ecosystem. There's just more diversity to pull from and to to lean on. Got you. So we've kind of covered in a way diversity is being very important for the stability of these colonies. Obviously, I assume what's happening is in North Atlantic. You're not seeing as much diversity or the diversity is being affected by what's happening in terms of stratification and warming and and shifting. Is that is that what you found in that?

1:54:27 And the big difference. Yeah. So so we're seeing that, you know, in places where there is greater prey diversity, there is less of a response to warming, there's less of a response to stratification, and there's less of an overall trend in breeding productivity, which tells us basically like these systems are more resilient. And we think it has to do with the community of prey available. So diversity is the meal ticket, literally. Yeah. Yeah. Keeping these these colonies stable. So from this perspective, like identifying them is one thing and identifying the reasoning that could be this what's stable. Like how how confident is this like this? What you found here in terms of diversity? Like is it pretty significant where the the more diverse area, the better the colony?

1:55:24 I think this is like this is a very big picture taken at what we think might explain what's going on. It's not very mechanistic in terms of saying this is exactly what drives right particular seabird species decline. Right. And this is one of the like cool things about science in general, I think is that you get to like pick the scale that you're going to look at a question. And you can't look at everything at the same scale all at once. Like there, there are certain reasons why you might want to take a big picture scale. And then there are certain reasons why you really want to look at a narrow example and understand the exact mechanism behind that.

1:56:06 So, you know, we're we're looking at these really big picture trends, but there's a lot of important research that still has yet to be done linking, you know, what is it about diet diversity and prey switching for these species across different locations that may or may not be impacted by the sort of climate and environmental conditions when the birds are breeding. And there's a lot of great data that these researchers collect on these colonies on diet. So that's something that we hope to do in the future. And it makes I mean, it makes more diverse area you have the better it is, you know, the more stable your ecosystem is from top predator down to the smallest of of of minute organism that's at the bottom of the food chain.

1:56:53 And I think that's that's an important thing. And I'm glad you mentioned scale because yes, that's absolutely important because, you know, we like you just sent the paper before that led to that. One of the reasons why it led to this paper was it would look at hemispheres and look at there's an hemisphere. Now you're looking within hemispheres, maybe like dive, like comparing between between two to different types of oceans in the northern hemisphere. Obviously very important, but you can dive even deeper into those and go down in scale and scale, which you'll probably get more. I guess like it'll just get more niche as you get down and those types of answers and answering more questions and so forth. From from this perspective, for my audience, what do you want people to get out of this? Like what what is the take home message for this paper? When it comes to like people who listen to early career scientists, non scientists, what what's the message you you and your co authors want to like the 50 some co authors want to want you to get out of this?

1:57:54 Yeah, I think, yeah, you know, there's a there's a few messages related to the scale point. It's kind of remarkable that looking at this huge scale, the whole ecosystem, like multiple countries, coastlines, we can see a detectable response to climate over decades across a whole diverse top predator community. Like that's pretty remarkable. Yeah. Normally for something like this, like where there's so many different species and so many different colonies, like that's that's very noisy. You would expect the noise to drown out the signal.

1:58:42 But we're actually seeing that like there is sort of a risk, a climate driven signal in the breeding productivity of these birds at these huge scales. And that tells us something really important about climate change that tells us that we're seeing huge ecosystem scale effects because of our changing climate at this point. That's remarkable. So I think, you know, one thing is, you know, what do we do with that? Well, like, there's a lot that we can do about climate change broadly, thinking specifically about seabirds and top predators, I would encourage people to spend time learning about these organisms, because it's, it's very easy for these losses and these changes to be out of sight, out of mind when you don't have to be able to do that.

1:59:34 Out of mind when you don't have any idea what these species are. And because seabirds spend so much of their lives at sea, like, they're, they're in some ways very distant from our like, you know, daily experience, but they're amazing. They're worth learning about. So I encourage people to spend some time learning about what these organisms are, how they make a living. And I think that kind of knowledge acquisition can be an important response to these, these big messages. About how climate change is altering our world. Another thing, though, you know, big takeaway from this paper was that prey diversity seems to be associated with greater ecosystem scale stability in light of climate.

2:00:21 And what that tells us is that it's important to when you have that diversity to conserve it. So there's all kinds of techniques that fisheries managers are learning about related to ecosystem based fisheries management, taking those incorporating those kinds of policies, taking the ecosystem into account when we're, we're making fisheries decisions about how many of these forage fish that we know other predators rely on how many should we be taking out. Those are important considerations that need to come into play. And then the last thing is just that kind of the importance of these data sets in general, like we're only able to see this signal popping out because of the tireless dedication of these, you know, many, many, many researchers, and there are many, many unnamed interns who are involved in collecting this data.

2:01:20 Like, that's the only reason that we're able to tell this story and to see these signals and to make these claims. So this, like the long term monitoring someone somewhere decided to fund someone to go collect data on a remote island for decades. That is so important that we continue to do that, especially for these places that have these long term records, we got to continue those records, we got to continue collecting data. And then the other thing we need to do is we need to go collect more data in places that are underrepresented. So we know looking at the southern hemisphere. Part of the reason we chose the northern hemisphere is because there's just vastly more data across across different ecosystems.

2:02:04 If you look to the southern hemisphere, there's places where there's lots of data, and then there's vast expanses of space where we don't have many records, right? You need to go to those places and get information about how ecosystems and species are faring in those places. Yeah, because it's interesting, you know, you mentioned at the beginning, the other study, the initial study that that kind of was the precursor to this one mentioned that southern hemisphere isn't seeing the as big of impact. But that may not be true just based off the data that we have. If we have more data, we might identify areas that there are more impact based on species that we have. It's just a matter of funding, getting people out there. Monitoring is expensive. It's not it's not cheap to do, but it's so important to have. It allows us to feed our our models, makes it more accurate and really gets to tell us what we're doing.

2:02:55 And as you mentioned here, this is a case in point where being able to have was 138 data sets set was that the number? Yeah, 138 data sets, 39 species to be able to look at for over decades and and and having one metric that you can really focus on that's measured the same way across those data sets is extremely important to be able to come to these conclusions and be able to identify some hot spots to monitor even more and dive into even deeper. So this is this is absolutely amazing. Obviously, we don't like the results. We want to see better results in time, but we can't see it unless we we figure that out. And that's what this study highlights. And I do appreciate the work that you and your colleagues have done to be able to highlight this for us and coming on the podcast to be able to tell us all about.

2:03:41 It's been a pleasure to have you Helen on on this podcast. And if you had one thing that people can do, what would you recommend like just to help in this kind of situation? What would you say is the one thing that people do? Not not to say that we're going to be able to turn it around with this, but like the starter thing if people are not, you know, they don't know seabirds that well or or even conservation that well, and they want to help. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, it's a big, it's a big, it is a big one. It is a big one. And part of part of why it's difficult is because the scale we've chosen like this is like global scale. It's really hard to. Yeah, it's really hard to see the connection between an individual's action and that global scale.

2:04:27 Like this is the problem in like, you know, environmentalism broadly, like how do we make these connections? Yeah. Um, so I, I in some ways I like hesitate to say this because I really hope it doesn't sound like a cop out. But I, more and more, I'm really believing that I think it's just like so critical to spend time learning about the organisms and the environment that surrounds you. As being like an active part of your environmentalism. Yeah. So maybe you live on the coast and you take some time to learn more about these species that are around you. You know, some of the in Southern California, some of these seabirds that we have monitoring programs for and are included in this paper.

2:05:15 There's been like an enormous amount of really important research looking at like, for instance, like the history of DDT and brown pelican populations, like that's something that is like tangible for an individual living in Southern California to like to to learn about and to try to understand and to try to be involved in preventing those kinds of things in the future or making protections for these species. So, you know, I think that's a really important thing. Is every individual going to be able to protect all of these species around the world? No, but I think it's critical for each of us to actually spend time learning about the species that are around us so that we can learn about what conservation looks like in our local areas.

2:06:03 Absolutely. In our, in our states and our countries and our provinces. So yeah, it's what I have in mind. Yeah, I agree. It's so important to know the environment around you, whether you're on the coast or not. There's great apps like iNaturalist to be able to identify like plant species and insects and things like that that are around your area that I find like once you're more in tuned with that you start to notice the just your surrounding environment more and you notice if it's going up. It leads you to be more curious, right? And I'm sure just coming back to you being a science teacher and just being like, just be curious because that that'll lead you down sort of like a wormhole of learning more and more about the environment and then being more aware of it.

2:06:47 And I think a lot of the times the way we live, especially here in North America, we live in a very fast paced society where we're just trying to get to the next thing. And we just kind of ignore what's around us. And if you start to just look around, there's apps, there's so many things like even this, the seabirds.feralandinstitute.org like going to this, which I'll put in the show notes and just learning about seabirds and seeing these and like the studies that are going on. It's going to be educational for you. We're going to learn a lot. And you're going to come around with some pretty cool things to talk at parties and talk to people and, you know, introduce what you're what you're learning. And I think it's I think it's great. And I love the fact that you're coming on this podcast and and being a part of this and helping people understand what's happening with seabirds. So we'll definitely appreciate you coming on. We'd love to have you back to talk about more more things that you're working on. Yeah, totally happy to. It's been such a pleasure, Andrew. Thank you.

2:07:38 No problem. Thank you. Thank you, Helen, for joining us on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. It was great to be able to talk to you about just regular stuff about seabirds. I don't get a lot of seabird experts on. It was really great to see how you developed your career, how you went from teaching science to be able to use it to do research and also to tell the stories that she discovered with her colleagues and with this massive project to look at a very high overview of what's happening with seabirds. What's happening with seabirds and what it's telling us about the ocean and its health. I think it's something that's extremely, extremely important. And I also wanted to let people know that we have that link that we talked about a number of times during the interview.

2:08:19 It's seabirds dot Farallen Institute dot org. And I will put that in the show notes. Farallen or Farallon, I guess is what is how it's pronounced this F a R a L L O N and then Institute all one word. So seabirds dot Farallon Institute dot org. This is something that I think it's really great. We're going to talk about that. I think it's really great website, very interactive, kind of gives you the faces, the names of the people that are doing this type of work all about ocean temperature stratification, how important it is. It's going to be really great. And I think we need to dive deeper into all these studies. The locations of the study sites and everything are on that website. I think it's really important. Something to check out seabirds dot Farallen Institute dot org. We'll also put the link to the actual paper so you can take a look at that if you so desire. And I want to thank Helen again for joining us on the podcast. And if you have any questions or comments, let us know.

2:09:06 About seabirds or about this study, please let us know. You can put your comments in the comments section below if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're listening to this through audio on your favorite podcast app, you can contact me in a number of different ways. But go to Instagram at how to protect the ocean. Just DM me at how to protect the ocean or go to speak up for blue dot com forward slash contact and just fill out the form and go straight to my email. I'd love to hear from you. I want to thank you all for joining us and supporting us throughout this entire time. Ten years over ten years of doing this podcast. It's something that's very special to me and I hope it's special to you as you grow and listen to this podcast. I really do appreciate you listening and having questions and engaging. It's always a lot of fun. So thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the true North strong and free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.