Hi all,

Just to follow up - the link to the paper by Haman et al. is here
<http://www.bioone.org/doi/10.7589/2012-04-119?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%3Dpubmed&;>
(including
the abstract). I think the full text is behind a paywall for most, but send
me an email if you would like a pdf.

The authors have some evidence that on at least one occasion a wreck of
Great Shearwaters may have been caused by poor food conditions in the South
Atlantic, during their molting period prior to migration. These birds make
the crossing of the low-productivity Tropics quite quickly, and travel past
Long Island just before arriving at their "early winter" feeding grounds
off of Massachusetts. It's possible that poor conditions somewhere very
distant would cause them to start the journey without full reserves. We are
only beginning to learn the details of the migration patterns in a lot of
seabirds, and there are still plenty of unanswered questions in the field.

I'm eagerly awaiting the results of the necropsies being performed on the
collected specimens.

Michael Schrimpf
Setauket/
Stony Brook University

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 5:26 PM, Shaibal Mitra <shaibal.mi...@csi.cuny.edu>
wrote:

> I spent several hours at Democrat Pt today, carefully checking the entire
> wrack line, and found 14 dead Great Shearwaters and a dead Leatherback
> Turtle (the folks in Riverhead have been notified).
>
> http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S37704445
>
> I also just heard through Derek Rogers that dead Great Shearwaters have
> been found on the beach at Montauk.
>
> To me, the simultaneous deaths of these shearwaters, along with the Brown
> Booby and the Leatherback Turtle, seem more than a coincidence and are
> suggestive of something wrong out there in the blue water, probably
> relating to food.
>
> At this point, it seems that the weather pattern described by David
> Nicosia probably played a role in concentrating these animals in our area,
> but would not in itself have caused their distress. Andrew Farnsworth has
> described major sea surface temperature anomalies in the Atlantic; this
> sort of thing could have big impacts on marine food webs, and it is
> possible that the birds encountered food shortages over larger areas and
> longer periods than they could tolerate. Finally, Michael Schrimpf alerted
> us to a paper describing 12 mass mortality events involving Great
> Shearwaters on the US Atlantic Coast (GREAT SHEARWATER (PUFFINUS GRAVIS)
> MORTALITY EVENTS ALONG THE EASTERN COAST OF THE UNITED STATES. Journal of
> Wildlife Diseases, 49(2), 2013, pp. 235–245 # Wildlife Disease Association
> 2013. Katherine H. Haman,1,2 Terry M. Norton,2 Robert A. Ronconi,3 Nicole
> M. Nemeth,1 Austen C. Thomas,4 Sarah J. Courchesne,5 Al Segars,6 and M.
> Kevin Keel7,8).
> I haven't read this yet, but a quick scan reveals not only that many GRSH
> involved in strandings were emaciated, but also that in some cases they had
> swallowed plastic.
>
> We await further data on the scale of the wreck, and on the condition of
> the specimens that have been salvaged.
>
> Shai Mitra
> Bay Shore
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