When it comes to monitoring the health of the ocean, scientists rely on dead seabirds, specifically how many wash up on beaches. On May 31, several Unalaskans gathered at the PCR to learn how to count them.
Their instructor was Allie Brown, the participant coordinator for COASST. It’s a program out of the University of Washington that trains residents from Alaska to Northern California to survey their local beaches for dead seabirds.
“We document dead birds because there’s lots of them,” she said. “If we were documenting dead orca whales, we probably wouldn't get that much data because they luckily aren't washing up dead all the time.”
There are a lot of birds in the Aleutians. The region is part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, where nearly 40 million seabirds nest every summer.
And because seabirds depend on the ocean to survive, Brown said their deaths can reveal when marine conditions are changing. Those shifts can be driven by oil spills, algae blooms or marine heatwaves.
“When you start going over many years, you can start seeing if these changes are occurring over and over again,” Brown said. “You can really see those catastrophes, these mass mortality events in the data at a certain point.”
Scientists say human-caused climate change is making ocean events like marine heat waves more frequent. Those are when warm waters last for a long period of time, disrupting the fish and other organisms that seabirds eat.
The last major marine heat wave was from 2014-2016, known as “the Blob.” It caused the largest wildlife die-off of a single species ever recorded; an estimated 1 million common murres died. Decades of COASST data from volunteers helped reveal that historical catastrophe.
“You never know when things are going to happen,” Brown said. “We really need that consistent feedback, that consistent science coming through.”
That’s why Brown hopes to train more Unalaskans to count dead seabirds. She said even an empty beach is still worth recording because zero is an important data point.
