Biologist David Irons made a grim discovery while walking along the beach of Whittier, a western Prince William Sound town, in early January - hundreds of dead seabirds that we now know are most likely record numbers, a sure indication that the ecosystem has been tattered by the unusually warm sea water, according to WCVB. The dead birds looked to have met their fate by starvation and were lined up along the shore where the tide had left them.
"We have never found close to 8,000 birds on a 1-mile long beach before," Irons said. "It is an order of magnitude larger than any records that I am aware of."
Since the event, fellow biologist Tamara Zeller has been boating around Prince William Sound in search of other dead or sick murres and in the process has been tallying the amount of birds floating in the water. On Jan. 7 about two weeks ago, she counted 98 birds on the water and 284 on the shore. At the end of the day, the totally tally was at a whopping 3,000.
Heather Renner, a biologist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, claims that the die-off is a part of a much bigger event that extends past Whittier and estimated that approximately 100,000 common murres have met their death in a similar manner.
"It's hard to know how many birds have died because Alaska is so big, and there are so many remote areas," Renner said.
After testing approximately 100 carcasses, the cause of death was determined to be emaciation, likely due to a lack of a proper food supply.
Despite the alarming number of deaths, even these high numbers are unlikely to put a major dent in the seabird population, according to CNN. However, the findings should not go unnoticed.
"Seabird biologists say seabirds are indicators of the health of the ecosystem," Irons said. "Now they're dying and that is telling us something. We should be aware of that. If we don't record they're dying it goes unnoticed."
As of now, scientists know that the birds are likely starving to death and it is connected to the warm ocean waters, but further than that no one knows the exact cause of the occurances, according to CBS46.
