Why Are Puffins Vanishing? The Hunt for Clues Goes Deep (Into Their Burrows)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/29/climate/puffins-dwindling-iceland.html

Source:  By John Schwartz, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Overfishing, hunting and pollution are putting pressure on the birds, but climate change may prove to be the biggest challenge. ... The birds have been in precipitous decline, especially since the 2000s, both in Iceland and across many of their Atlantic habitats. The potential culprits are many: fickle prey, overfishing, pollution. Scientists say that climate change is another underlying factor that is diminishing food supplies and is likely to become more important over time. And the fact that puffins are tasty, and thus hunted as game here, hardly helps. ... Around Iceland, the puffins have suffered because of the decline of their favorite food, silvery sand eels, which dangle from the parents’ beaks as they bring them to their young. That collapse correlates to a rise in sea surface temperatures that Dr. Hansen has been monitoring for years. ...Between the 1965-1995 cold cycle and the current warm cycle, Dr. Hansen said, winter temperature records show about one degree Celsius of additional warming — a seemingly small amount, but disastrous for the sand eels. His theory, he said, is this: “If you increase temperatures one degree, you’re changing their growth rates and their ability to survive the winter”.....