"A new study unravels the mystery of what caused so many of these normally resilient seabirds to starve amid an ocean heat wave fueled in part by global warming."
"David Irons was driving past a beach in Whittier, Alaska, on New Year's Day four years ago when something caught his eye. It was an endless line of white lumps near the water's edge—piles of something that shouldn't be there.
They were dead sea birds, and the bodies were everywhere. "I just couldn't believe it," said Irons, a recently retired biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "We started counting them, and we just counted a section and we got to 1,500."
In all, he and his wife, son and a friend found 8,000 dead birds on a beach about a mile long. A dead zone of common murres—a species known for its resilience."
Sabrina Shankman reports for InsideClimate News January 15, 2020.
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