7 ms·
Puffins are in trouble
- throwaway5752 8y agoTo summarize: it's climate change. Just working it's way up the food chain until it impacts the apex predator on this planet.
- esaym 8y agoEh, you left off the hunters "killed hundreds" per day part...
- FactolSarin 8y agoThis is only tangentially related to the article, but if you have small children I can't recommend Puffin Rock enough as a kids show. It teaches really simple environmental messages in a very subtle way while being absolutely adorable and fun to watch.
- baseten 8y agoWho knew puffins had irish accents? Watch out for those seagulls!
- war1025 8y agoCame here to post the exact same thing.
- newfie_bullet 8y agoI love that Chris O'Dowd [1] does the narration. Great mix of calming accent and my enjoyment of the IT crowd. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_O%27Dowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_O%27Dowd
- guildan 8y agoCompared to a lot of other kids shows, I find that it's still fun to watch but it's also really relaxing. The music, the narration and the design have a calming feeling to them. Really a good show :)
- ecolonsmak 8y agoToo many people.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- blondie9x 8y agoWhen the adults can’t catch enough to feed themselves and the chicks, they make an instinctive Malthusian choice; the chicks starve. Dr. Fayet called her quest “heartbreaking”: “You put your hand in the burrow and feel with your hand a little ball on the floor, but then you realize it’s cold, and not moving.”
- mattigames 8y agoMaybe the presence of 7,646,237,844 people in the world has something to do with it; at the end of the day for as sad as it seems the best thing it could happen to wildlife is a plague that only affects humans (perhaps a plague that sterilizes us would suffice)
- overcast 8y agoPopulation growth has been slowing since the late 60's, it peaked in 1968. Western countries are being particularly affected by it, as we have less and less, or no children. The predictions of humans overwhelming the Earth just isn't going to happen. Since you're just wasting our resources, feel free to sacrifice yourself though for the greater good. http://blogs.worldbank.org/futuredevelopment/rapid-slowdown-population-growth http://blogs.worldbank.org/futuredevelopment/rapid-slowdown-...
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoWe are already overwhelming the earth by just about every measure. We're already using more than one planet's worth of resources, sustainability overshoot comes ever earlier each year. As seen by the sheer number of disparate stories about earth and species' inability to cope. "Population growth has been slowing" Which of course means it is still growing. How many decades ago should it have started to fall in order to avoid catastrophic climate change or the incessant stream of environmental bad news and loss of species? No one should feel obligated to sacrifice themselves. They should feel obligated to replicate less if they want their own children to inhabit somewhere worth living.
- overcast 8y agoWhat's less? What is your approved number of children for each couple? If someone remarries, does that x number of children carry over from their previous?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jgraham 8y agoPeople might also be interested in the Guardian article [1], which concentrated on the precipitous decline of Puffin numbers in Shetland. Compared to places where the drop has not been so steep, it seems that the birds are having to travel much further to find food (hundreds of kilometers in some cases), which is linked to changes in sea temperatures as a result of global warming; as sea temperatures change plankton are not available at the right time to feed sand eel larvae and so there aren't so many sand eels for the puffins to eat. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/03/shetland-seabirds-climate-change-catastrophe-terns-kittiwakes-puffins https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/03/shetland...
- TheBeardKing 8y agoTLDR: Warming oceans lead to the decline of sand eels which they feed to their young.
- creaghpatr 8y agoAnyone who wants to passively save some puffins should eat Puffins the cereal. http://barbaras.com/community/project-puffin/ http://barbaras.com/community/project-puffin/
- driverdan 8y agoWhy does a GPS tracker cost $800? What's special about it that pushes the cost so high?
- matdehaast 8y agoOur company uses various GPS trackers on a daily basis, the only thing that I can imagine pushes the cost that high is size. Smaller = Higher Cost. As the birds probably can only take so much extra weight
- elipsey 8y agoI don't know about GPS trackers, but my experience with scientific sensors in general has been that they tend to be quite expensive when compared to similar commodity items. They need to be in robust waterproof housings, compatible with other proprietary equipment and software, and accessible to non-programmers and newbs. I have seen things less fancy then a GPS tracker, like temperature or water level sensors with a few kb of storage and a serial port, that easily exceed $800 cost. This is frustrating to scientists, and many use substitute consumer equipment, roll their own when they can, or substitute cheap labor for overpriced automation. Sometimes an undergrad research assistant with sneaker-net is cheaper then then sensors' proprietary networking module. Most of this stuff has a "stuck in the 90's" kind of feel to it. 9600b serial ports, ncurses looking vendor software and propriety radio instead of wifi or cellular. Which would be cool if it was free and open, but it's not. I think it's low-volume, high margin market, and not very competitive. An opportunity perhaps?
- ehavener 8y agosure sounds like an opportunity
- heybrandons 8y agoWhat can we do to help?
- f_allwein 8y agoGlobal warming may be slowed down to less catastrophic levels if society changes to live more sustainably, most importantly by burning less fossil fuel. Vote for political parties who support this, lobby your elected representatives to push for sustainable policies. Try to convince as many people as possible that this an issue we need to address now.
- newfie_bullet 8y agoI live in Newfoundland and here the Puffin (our provincial bird) is doing really well [1]. The town where I'm from I can drive 5 minutes to two separate puffin nesting sites and in the city where I live I can get to a colony of 300,000 in ~20mins. Not trying to diminish the issues seen by the Iceland birds but I'm glad they appear to be doing well here. Great for our tourism too. (Should also note that they can't be hunted here either) [1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/puffins-aplenty-newfoundland-despite-struggling-survive-globally-201657180.html https://ca.news.yahoo.com/puffins-aplenty-newfoundland-despi...
- grovesNL 8y agoI'm glad they're still doing well in Newfoundland. I always enjoyed spotting them on the small island next to Cape Bonavista Lighthouse.
- matz1 8y agoI heard they are delicious, I hope I get a chance to taste it before they are extinct.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do this here.