Seabird Die-offs

In this episode of “Island Interviews,” naturalist Suzi Golodoff, who has studied Unalaska's birds for nearly 50 years, shares her initial reaction to the common murre population decline and what Unalaska residents can do to help birds adapt to global warming.

The murre die-off might have gone unexplained if it weren't for decades of observations from researchers and citizen scientists.

For millions of years, birds lived nearly predator free in the Aleutian Islands. The volcanic archipelago stretches westward for 1,200 miles from the Alaska Peninsula, dotting a border between the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. Hundreds of bird species thrived here. But then came the rats. When a Japanese boat sank in the Western Aleutians around 1780, stowaway rats jumped ship and made it to one of the islands, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem.

Paralytic shellfish poisoning, caused by eating seafood contaminated with toxins from harmful algal blooms, can be deadly to humans. Now, using marine…