One of the most powerful books I've read recently is "The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers" by Adam Nicolson. It chronicles the lives and survival of our major seabirds and describes their innate ability to survive under changing circumstances. The book is in fact a lesson in survival and evolution that humans could learn much from.
One of the main stories in this book is the greater understanding we have recently acquired about the use of smell by birds to navigate. It is pivotal in the survival of some birds like the Shearwater and other "tubenoses". But as usual, us humans are now totally screwing this up for the birds. With plastic. These recent revelations are horrendous and should be more widely publicised, and so I share these quotes from the book:
“Gabrielle Nevitt, a professor at the University of California at Davis, has been pursuing the significance of scent in seabirds for more than quarter of a century". She recently worked with “Tim Bates, a chemist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was investigating a gas called dimethyl sulphide, or DMS, which is emitted by phytoplankton, the microscopic plants that live on the surface of the ocean, particularly when they are damaged.”
“Nevitt knew that the gas is released when krill – a major food source for seabirds – devour phytoplankton. ‘I’d read about DMS,’ Nevitt says. ‘But it never occurred to me it might have an odor.’ It all clicked into place. The birds pick up the DMS trail and follow it to schools of krill. When Bates showed her a map of DMS plumes, Nevitt saw that they were more concentrated in areas with geographic formations near the ocean’s surface. ‘I could see peaks and valleys of DMS over shelf breaks, seamounts, and other underwater features, and I realized the ocean’s surface wasn’t featureless to the birds,’ she says. ‘They have their own map, an odor landscape, in the air above the water.’ It was, says Nevitt, the kind of ‘aha’ moment scientists live for.” (p. 222-223)
But…
"There is one disturbing footnote to this remarkable sequence of discoveries: small pieces of plastic that have been floating in the ocean for a while also produce a plume of dimethyl sulphide which all of the tubenoses –the shearwaters, the fulmars, the petrels and the albatrosses –now mistake for food. They don’t eat the little bits of plastic because they look like prey but because they smell like it. The plastic we have scattered across the ocean has become a sensory trap for the birds, and other sea creatures, that are out there in search of sustenance." (p. 232)
This is horrendous, and goes toward explaining the deceased sea birds with guts full of plastic that we saw on Blue Planet II. Fortunately Attenborough has now put the issue of plastic in many more peoples minds.
We need to all be aware that plastic is only safe if properly recycled. And who is doing that? Some of us also join in with #2MinuteBeachClean when we can, but the only long term solution is to develop alternatives to plastic, globally. And what chance have we got of making this happen when the superpowers are preoccupied with a new Cold War.....
Oy Vey!
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