Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.11.2011, Page 14

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 17 — 2011
Puffins | Mystery
Where Have All The Puffins Gone?
Puffin expert Erpur Snær Hansen explains!
Words
Anna Andersen
Photo
Julia Staples
After spending the summer nest-
ing—mostly in Vestmannaeyjar, off
the south coast of Iceland—the na-
tion’s two to three million resident
puffin pairs have returned to sea
for the winter. While this fact alone
is hardly newsworthy, those puffins
have returned with hardly any puf-
flings in tow for the seventh consec-
utive year, and that’s newsworthy.
When it comes time to leave, a number
of pufflings confuse streetlights for the
moon—the puffin’s compass—and get
stranded in town. Thus it has long been
a tradition amongst kids in Vestman-
naeyjar to go out looking for the help-
less birds. They scoop them up in boxes,
keep them over night, and then release
them out to sea where they regain their
bearings the following morning.
This September kids found twelve
pufflings—two more than last year—
which Erpur Snær Hansen, a biologist at
South Iceland Nature Research Centre,
says are awfully small numbers. “Ten
chicks in town means that about 500
chicks were born,” Erpur says. “It’s ba-
sically a joke. In a normal year, 500.000
chicks are born.”
Though Erpur says the puffin colony
has waned in the past, people don’t no-
tice when it happens gradually; it’s when
it happens all of a sudden that people
take note. “In 2005, people started get-
ting worried when they saw puffin colo-
nies paved with dead chicks,” Erpur
says, “and last year, the puffins basically
gave up before the chicks even came
around with only 17% of eggs hatching
normally.”
SOMETHING HAPPENED IN 2005
Erpur and his colleagues took pictures
of 12.000 birds in 2007 and 2008 to age
them by their bills, and discovered that
the 2005 and 2006 cohorts were basi-
cally non-existent. Since then they have
been closely monitoring chick produc-
tion, and have found that with the excep-
tion of 2007, it has been effectively nil.
“Something happened in 2005,” Er-
pur says. “It’s difficult to explain exactly
what it was, but something failed.” He
names two hypotheses that may ex-
plain the diminished chick production:
‘Increased predation,’ and ‘mismatch of
food supply.’
“You could say that what’s going on
in the sea is basically a circus,” Erpur
says, prefacing the first hypothesis—in-
creased predation. The crux of it has
to do with ocean temperature, which
he says rises and falls every 70 years—
a cyclical phenomenon first described
in a 1994 issue of Nature magazine. “In
1996, we started a warm cycle,” he says.
“It takes some years to warm up, and
we have now reached temperatures of
the last heat period between 1930 and
1960.”
This has brought about a slew of
changes, including an increase in known
predators, such as the mackerel, which
started showing up in 2005—and in great
numbers to the mackerel club’s chagrin.
“If you look at the situation in Agatha
Christie terms, the mackerel is one of
the primary suspects… only the last
chapter is missing,” Erpur says. “They
are ferocious predators. They are like
vacuum cleaners that basically clean up
everything when they come to Icelandic
waters, which they have done before.”
Still, Erpur is cautious to pin it on
the mackerel given the heated debate
about whether or not Icelanders should
be permitted to fish the species. “We
cannot really know what they were do-
ing in 2005,” Erpur says. “Everything bad
about them is used to justify the hunt,
as the mackerel is a highly valued fish.
It’s basically nationalistic propaganda to
say, ‘well we need to kill some whales to
keep nature in balance’. It’s pseudosci-
ence. There is no balance. Change is the
status quo.”
He describes the second hypothe-
sis—mismatch of the food supply—as an
old, classic, initially put forth to explain
why most big commercial predators
have varying cohort sizes. “The idea is
that fish larvae—like sand eel larvae—
didn’t coincide with the peak of the zoo-
plankton. For instance, if they hatched
earlier or if there was a delayed plankton
bloom, the fish that feed on the plankton
would have starved to death,” he says.
“The problem is that these hypoth-
eses are trying to explain some events
that happened in the past and we don’t
have much data to differentiate between
them,” he says. “It’s probably a mixture
of everything. That’s the feeling you get
when you start looking at these things.”
WIll THEY MAKE A COMEBACK?
Iceland is, according to the Icelandic
Hunting Club, the only country in the
world where puffins can be hunted, and
an average 76.000 have been hunted
every year. Given their dramatic decline,
locals in Vestmannaeyjar reduced the
hunting season from 45 days to 20 in
2008, to 5 days in 2009, and then banned
hunting altogether this year.
Though this is a commendable ini-
tiative taken in Vestmannaeyjar, Erpur
calls the current system of regulation
“arcane.” “It doesn’t make sense to allow
hunting in the north when everything is
going down the drain in Vestmannaey-
jar,” he says. He believes that puffins
should be considered a national popu-
lation managed by a single unit. Even if
hunting 15.000 puffins a year—each sell-
ing for 500 ISK a head—is not likely to
collapse the population, Erpur says it’s
not sustainable given that there are not
enough chicks being born to make up
for the dying adults.
“The decline has been going on for
seven years, and it could continue for
another twenty years given the heat cy-
cle,” he points out. “Hunting them is sim-
ply not ethical.” So he hopes the Minister
for the Environment Svandís Svavarsdót-
tir, who has been rewriting and modern-
izing Icelandic environmental legisla-
ture, will succeed in passing legislation.
Otherwise there is no telling if Iceland’s
most populous bird—and popular tourist
attraction—will make a comeback.
“If you look at the situation in Agatha Christie
terms, the mackerel is one of the primary suspects…
only the last chapter is missing.”
What ever are we to put on our postcards and keychains once puffins are totally extinct? Elves? Might those be extinct
too? They are invisible, so it's kind of hard to tell. Let's instead try to make sure there will be plenty of puffins around for
future generations of tourists to enjoy looking at (and eating).