- Hundreds of thousands of Scottish seabirds have failed
to breed this summer in a wildlife catastrophe which is being linked by
scientists directly to global warming.
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- The massive unprecedented collapse of nesting attempts
by several seabird species in Orkney and Shetland is likely to prove the
first major impact of climate change on Britain.
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- In what could be a sub-plot from the recent disaster
movie, The Day After Tomorrow, a rise in sea temperature is believed to
have led to the mysterious disappearance of a key part of the marine food
chain - the sandeel, the small fish whose great teeming shoals have hitherto
sustained larger fish, marine mammals and seabirds in their millions.
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- In Orkney and Shetland, the sandeel stocks have been
shrinking for several years, and this summer they have disappeared: the
result for seabirds has been mass starvation. The figures for breeding
failure, for Shetland in particular, almost defy belief.
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- More than 172,000 breeding pairs of guillemots were recorded
in the islands in the last national census, Seabird 2000, whose results
were published this year; this summer the birds have produced almost no
young, according to Peter Ellis, Shetland area manager for the Royal Society
for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
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- Martin Heubeck of Aberdeen University, who has monitored
Shetland seabirds for 30 years, said: "The breeding failure of the
guillemots is unprecedented in Europe." More than 6,800 pairs of great
skuas were recorded in Shetland in the same census; this year they have
produced a handful of chicks - perhaps fewer than 10 - while the arctic
skuas (1,120 pairs in the census) have failed to produce any surviving
young.
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- The 24,000 pairs of arctic terns, and the 16,700 pairs
of Shetland kittiwakes - small gulls - have "probably suffered complete
failure", said Mr Ellis.
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- In Orkney the picture is very similar, although detailed
figures are not yet available. "It looks very bad," said the
RSPB's warden on Orkney mainland, Andy Knight. "Very few of the birds
have raised any chicks at all."
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- The counting and monitoring is still going on and the
figures are by no means complete: it is likely that puffins, for example,
will also have suffered massive breeding failure but because they nest
deep in burrows, this is not immediately obvious.
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- But the astonishing scale of what has taken place is
already clear - and the link to climate change is being openly made by
scientists. It is believed that the microscopic plankton on which tiny
sandeel larvae feed are moving northwards as the sea water warms, leaving
the baby fish with nothing to feed on.
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- This is being seen in the North Sea in particular, where
the water temperature has risen by 2C in the past 20 years, and where the
whole ecosystem is thought to be undergoing a "regime shift",
or a fundamental alteration in the interaction of its component species.
"Think of the North Sea as an engine, and plankton as the fuel driving
it," said Euan Dunn of the RSPB, one of the world's leading experts
on the interaction of fish and seabirds. "The fuel mix has changed
so radically in the past 20 years, as a result of climate change, that
the whole engine is now spluttering and starting to malfunction. All of
the animals in the food web above the plankton, first the sandeels, then
the larger fish like cod, and ultimately the seabirds, are starting to
be affected."
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- Research last year clearly showed that the higher the
temperature, the less sandeels could maintain their population level, said
Dr Dunn. "The young sandeels are simply not surviving."
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- Although over-fishing of sandeels has caused breeding
failures in the past, the present situation could not be blamed on fishing,
he said. The Shetland sandeel fishery was catching so few fish that it
was closed as a precautionary measure earlier this year. "Climate
change is a far more likely explanation."
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- The spectacular seabird populations of the Northern Isles
have a double importance. They are of great value scientifically, holding,
for example, the world's biggest populations of great skuas. And they are
of enormous value to Orkney and Shetland tourism, being the principal draw
for many visitors. The national and international significance of what
has happened is only just beginning to dawn on the wider political and
scientific community, but some leading figures are already taking it on
board.
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- "This is an incredible event," said Tony Juniper,
director of Friends of the Earth. "The catastrophe [of these] seabirds
is just a foretaste of what lies ahead.
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- "It shows that climate change is happening now,
[with] devastating consequences here in Britain, and it shows that reducing
the pollution causing changes to the earth's climate should now be the
global number one political priority."
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/
- environment/story.jsp?story=546138
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