A chance encounter between two very different scientists has solved the cause that three million dead birds were washed up on the east coast of Australia eight years ago.
Many birds were killed in 2013, and researchers have now found that hungry birds ate volcanic rock and plastic out of despair.
CSIRO scientist Lauren Roman, a researcher on plastic density in seabirds, said it was a strange event that hundreds of seabirds landed on a beach just off side of her research station full of pumice.
‘Very close to the research station where I was working at the time, there were over 100 dead and dying birds … on every kilometer of the very long beach, here,’ she told the Australian Daily Mail.
Working at the then Moreton Bay research center on North Stradbroke Island, Ms Roman hired science students to collect the birds and put them in a freezer to look at later.
Researchers have found dead birds that were swept off the east coast of Australia eight years ago
A few weeks later, she realized that the great death was not just happening in her backyard, but over thousands of kilometers on the east coast of Australia, from Fraser Island up north to Tasmania down south.
Even more unusual was what researchers found inside the birds when they made self-necropsies – four or five pumice stones, which are floating aerated volcanic rocks.
‘Sometimes you find a pumice stone or two in seabirds, but you seldom find many of them. And they are not found in the stomachs of almost all birds, ‘said Ms Roman.
3 million short-tailed birds died in 2013 (pictured)
The shocking discovery raised more questions than answers, especially since veterinarian autopsies showed the birds were in poor condition and may have starved to death.
There was no way Ms Roman could solve the puzzle on her own, but another mutual understanding was tied to just the expert she needed.
Scott Bryan was the supervisor of one of the students scheduled to collect the birds by Ms Roman – who was just an expert on pumice rallies, which are huge rocks on the ocean after explosions volcanic.
The birds were found full of pumice, volcanic rock (pictured), amazing explorers
‘Scott and I were from very different subjects … you wouldn’t find us in the same building together or talking to each other,’ Ms Roman said.
‘But none of us would have been able to solve this mystery without the knowledge of the other.’
In a team that included Dr. Kathy Townsend, Dr. Natalie Bool and then third-year student who connected the two researchers, Leah Gustafson, a question was put together.
Did the birds die because they ate the volcanic rock, or did they eat it with hunger?
An eight-year study of the mystery revealed the source of the rock
First the group had to work out where these birds were – fortunately for Ms Roman, a woman she sat next to as a student had spent years monitoring the migration patterns of the bird species. this particular, which was consistent each year.
Next, Mr. Bryan and Ms. Gustafson had to identify the origin of the rocks, and used satellite systems to determine that it was from the 2012 Havre eruption in the Kermadec arc north of New Zealand.
Ocean birds would usually feast in the Arctic circle before migrating for ten days to the southern hemisphere, where they would breed in Victoria or Tasmania, and sometimes even as far down as Antarctica.
‘We realized that the birds could only have interacted with that pumice in the few days before they died,’ Ms Roman said.
So they must have been already in poor condition and already very hungry at the time they were interacting with the pumice raft.
‘If they were in a fat state, they would have just flown past that. They would not have stopped to try to sort food in despair because they would have no reason to stop. ‘
The researchers concluded that the birds ate the pumice (pictured) because they were hungry.
The next step for the researchers is to find out why the birds were hungry.
They believe that they may have developed a famine in the northern hemisphere.
One possible explanation is that a wave of ocean heat up north from 2013 to 2016 – known as the Blob – destroyed the species that seal water feeds on.
Another is that because the species of birds and pink salmon – which are artificially reared and released – feed on the same food, the fish could be preyed upon. normal at the bark to steal.
The next step for scientists is to find out why the birds were hungry
Ms Roman is hoping to get grant money to continue the issue to solve the puzzle, and she expects that climate change could affect the birds.
‘Climate change is a threat to many different species of birds,’ she said.
‘But it’s a bit difficult to research because you’re looking at changes to a bird that are very, very hard to find.
‘They’re out. They live out in the middle of the sea. It is very difficult to know what is killing them when they start disappearing again because they live out in the middle of the ocean. ‘