Farallon Institute Newsletter - Fall 2023

Around The Office

We are all back to the office now after a busy summer of field work and vacations. Farallon Institute’s 2023 Summer Internship Program and the Seabird and the Ocean Outreach Fellowship were both highly successful. The Summer Internship Program worked with recent high school graduates to advance their scientific coding and data analysis skills, and knowledge of marine ecology. Erendira Ceballos, undergraduate at Sonoma State University, was the Seabird and Ocean Outreach Fellow, a position funded by the National Science Foundation. One product of her fellowship was the contribution of two articles for this edition of our newsletter: “The importance of seabirds as ocean indicators” and “Sharing a passion”. We hope you enjoy Erendira’s articles and we congratulate her on a fellowship well done.

State of the Ocean — Central-Northern California

Although it is not yet official, since sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies (difference from average) in the eastern equatorial Pacific have not been above 0.5°C for long enough, we are steadily transitioning into El Niño conditions and are currently under an El Niño advisory. While this is not the strongest event or transition we’ve seen at this time of year, this El Niño comes when SSTs are already high around the world. 

In fact, for the last five months, SST has been at an all-time high, according to NOAA and the University of Maine. During the last month, at least, SST has been about 0.3°C higher than the highest SST recorded before (2020), and 0.8°C higher than the 1981–2011 average (Figure). This might not sound like much, but it is a lot when we are talking about the ocean, the largest surface of our planet, and one that has enormous capacity to store heat.

More locally, in the northeast Pacific, we have a quasi-permanent marine heatwave, which has been at bay from our coast thanks to upwelling in past months. However, as the upwelling season and its influence dwindle going into the fall, warm anomalies are showing up on our coasts and are likely to continue as the El Niño develops.

Figure: Daily sea surface temperature average from the world oceans (latitudinal range 60°S to 60°N). Years 2022 (orange) and 2023 (bold black) are highlighted. Source: Climate Analyzer using NOAA’s OISSTV2 dataset.

The importance of seabirds as ocean indicators

Seabirds can tell us a lot about conditions in the ocean. For example, researchers can observe their diets, population numbers, reproductive rates, or chick growth for indications about what is happening in the ocean. Seabirds are sensitive to change, and any change in these biological characteristics can indicate a change in oceanic and food web conditions. 

One example of this comes from San Francisco Bay in 2009. That year, a decline in the anchovy population led to Brandt’s cormorants failing to nest on Alcatraz Island. Without many fish in the Bay, they were not able to raise chicks on the island. The reason for the decline in anchovy populations in the Bay was not determined, but one possibility is that the decline was due to El Niño.

El Niño is a global climate pattern that weakens winds and creates warmer ocean surface temperatures. El Niño disrupts a process called upwelling. Under normal conditions, coastal winds will push warm surface water offshore. As the warm water is pushed away, deeper cold water that contains nutrients will come up and fertilize phytoplankton. In turn, zooplankton and other primary consumers can eat phytoplankton, forming the base of the food web system. Because of upwelling, seabirds and other marine life are kept healthy. With El Niño, coastal winds are weakened, and cannot push warm surface waters away as well. This prevents the colder nutrient-filled water from coming up, which impacts food web systems. Under El Niño conditions, fish populations (like the San Francisco Bay anchovy in 2009) could decline and seabirds won’t have sufficient food to feed on or raise chicks.

In a similar sense, climate change can also cause a change in oceanic conditions, and seabirds can be used as a way to measure climate change factors. Climate change can directly or indirectly impact seabirds. For example, rising sea levels could disrupt seabirds' habitats, shift where they can feed, and an increase in extreme events, such as heatwaves and heavier rainfall, may cause an overall decline in fish populations. The work of seabird monitoring groups is an important way to measure climate change. They'll go out to different locations throughout the year to collect data and analyze trends over time. Looking at this data can help scientists make predictions or reveal current ocean conditions.

2023 Alcatraz Island seabird monitoring concludes

The 2023 seabird breeding season on Alcatraz is coming to a close as adults and fledglings leave the island to spend their winter along the Pacific coast seeking areas of upwelling and the associated foraging opportunities. Spring in San Francisco Bay started off strong, with researchers frequently observing large flocks of feeding seabirds and marine mammals. Included in these flocks were the western gulls and Brandt’s cormorants that nest on Alcatraz Island, in addition to common murres and even a few humpback whales, which enter the Bay relatively rarely. These observations, as well as over twenty records of banded cormorants originating from the Farallon Islands, indicated that the Bay was providing preferable foraging habitat over the nearby deeper waters of the ocean. This is likely due to concentrated schools of northern anchovy, which enter the Bay for spawning in the spring. Over the coming winter, researchers will conduct diet analysis on cormorant pellets to confirm these hypotheses.

These “feeding frenzies” kicked off a strong summer for the seabirds on Alcatraz. The first cormorant nests were confirmed on April 3 and the last nests were laid on June 28, giving an almost three-month span of nest initiation on the island. The colony continued its trend of expansion into the southeast side of the island, and cormorant nests now cover the majority of rubble piles on the Parade Grounds, left behind when the old officers’ quarters buildings were burned in the 1970s. This spatial expansion was accompanied by colony growth: the cormorant colony reached 4,325 visible nests as of September. This number will increase and likely exceed 2022’s record of 4,430 nests – researchers have yet to access the nests hidden from view in the summer. This success in a large breeding population was accompanied by some challenges, such as when heavy spring storms flooded about 40% of nests on the west side. However, cormorants of most of these nests were able to lay a second clutch, and overall the island produced an estimated 2.1 fledglings per nest, which is above the long-term mean.

Sharing a passion: Erendira Ceballos reflects on her FI fellowship

Whenever I went out to the ocean when I was a kid, I always saw different seabirds and thought they were cool and fascinating to look at, but what I never realized is that they can be used as ocean indicators (see “Importance of seabirds” article above). They play an important role in ecosystems and observing seabirds can tell us if conditions of the ocean are healthy or not. The environment as a whole is interconnected and seabirds are one of the ways we can physically see that interconnectedness. I've been interested in how different systems work together to create the environment we live in today. 

As the Farallon Institute Seabird and the Ocean Outreach Fellow this summer, this is the story I would try to share with others while at Alcatraz Island. I was hoping to change the minds of those who thought birds were just a nuisance, and these people were able to realize the importance of seabirds and learned some cool facts that made seabirds interesting. My favorite fact to tell others was how sweet gulls are to their chicks. They’ll switch from their ‘garbage’ diet to a natural diet when raising their young. They want their kids to grow strong and healthy! Gulls chose a lifetime partner and will take turns taking care of their chicks. Many people did not realize how intelligent and gentle gulls can be. 

At Sonoma State University, I am majoring in Environmental Science and I want to concentrate on hands-on research in the future. My internship at Farallon Institute allowed me to gain further experience and knowledge to advance into future careers. I shadowed and assisted bird monitoring groups at Gull Rock where we would set up telescopes, write down the conditions for the day, and count thousands of seabirds. While at Alcatraz, I conducted my own research focusing on vocal communication between gulls. I was also able to explore possible career paths and create immediate and long-term goals on how to get there. My current goal is to reach out for other possible internships and I am drafting materials to participate in Sonoma State’s Week of Research and Creativity event. At this event, I will present to SSU students and faculty what I learned while working with Farallon Institute. Overall, I’m glad I was able to share my passion for the environment and educate others about the importance of seabirds.