Farallon Institute Newsletter - Summer 2020

Around The [Home] Office

Farallon Institute acknowledges that structural and systemic racism have led to major injustices against people of color, and shaped the lack of diversity in the fields of atmospheric and marine sciences.  We are renewing our commitment to be inclusive and supportive of diversity within our Institute, as well as in our collaborative efforts with other scientific and conservation institutions. 

We recognize that we need to do more now and into the future.  To meet this urgent goal, we have initiated regular meetings to discuss and hold ourselves accountable on this issue, and continuously assess our responsibility to dismantle systemic racism, and any other form of discrimination, in STEM.  We have begun to create opportunities to increase the interest, recruitment, and retention of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in our atmospheric and marine science projects through internships and mentoring programs within the Institute, and in collaboration with other organizations.  As part of this, we are exploring ways to reach out to our local communities, wherein the large BIPOC population is not reflected in the sciences as we believe they should be, fully and completely.

We invite you to stay tuned as we learn, improve, and create new opportunities for BIPOC, and to participate with us in making atmospheric and marine sciences more equitable.  Farallon Institute will continue to take an active stance in the fight against systemic racism in the United States.

State of the Ocean

This summer we are experiencing normal ocean conditions in the central California Current, with warm temperatures cooled by intermittent pulses of coastal upwelling.  The story is different for the northern and southern parts of the California Current, however.  Anomalously warm waters in the south have prevailed, though they do not cover a large enough area to be classified as a marine heatwave (based on the California Current Marine Heatwave Tracker).  The Northeast Pacific has been experiencing a marine heatwave since late June that is centered south of the Gulf of Alaska.  As of August 1, it seems to be dissipating along the eastern boundary, but at times it has extended to the northern California Current. The figure below shows sea surface anomaly conditions (difference from normal) for July 15, 2020, in the Northeast Pacific and the California Current.

The 2020 Alcatraz Island seabird monitoring season

Despite most of the Bay Area feeling less crowded than normal this summer, the cormorants breeding on Alcatraz probably wouldn’t say the same about their breeding colony.  The colony passed its previous record of 2,120 nests this year, and some birds even attempted to nest twice!  This happens occasionally on Alcatraz and is an indication that there is plenty of food available for the birds to try again.  Alcatraz Island has been closed to the public since March 2020, and without the multitudes of people walking on island paths, the cormorants have also started nesting closer and closer to where visitors can typically view them.  This is the most notable difference this year compared to a typical one with abundant visitors, and we look forward to seeing if this continues in future years.

Another interesting addition to the data this year is that since no city 4th of July fireworks show was held (which usually creates a huge disturbance to nesting birds on Alcatraz), we were able to do a control year for our disturbance monitoring, meaning for comparison with the normal July 4th holiday, we monitored for disturbances to the birds in the absence of fireworks.  During the evening that we monitored without a fireworks show, there was one late-night helicopter that caused birds to react, but otherwise the seabird observers witnessed a peaceful seabird colony as hundreds of additional cormorants came in to roost.  

Since our last update, most of the Brandt’s cormorant and western gull chicks have grown up; they’ve developed their feathers and many have already left the colony. Our work on the island isn’t quite done yet because there were some late nesters that are still raising small chicks, but as things wind down in the field we’re able to focus our efforts more on getting data analyzed, to add to the 27-year time-series. Once our annual Alcatraz report is finalized, it will be available for anyone interested in how the birds did (and what the record breaking number of cormorant nests was) during this atypical year!

Insights from the COVID-19 ‘anthropause’

A new study has coined the term ‘anthropause’ to describe the unprecedented reduction in human mobility around the globe in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Following the beginning of lockdowns, there were observations around the world of animal species benefiting from reduced human presence, particularly at the fringes of urban areas.  Multitudes of instances of wild animals venturing into populated areas can be found on social media: pumas in downtown Santiago, Chile, dolphins swimming in the harbor of Trieste, Italy, and jackals in urban parks of Tel Aviv, Israel.  There are also reports of some animals normally accustomed to more contact with humans that are suffering from reduced interaction.  These include species such as rats, gulls, or monkeys that had become reliant on human sources for food. 

Other impacts of the pandemic’s change to human movements relate to some places where humans are using green spaces, especially those near urban areas, more than normal given the limited aspects of pandemic life.  The sudden increased presence of people in those areas leads to increased disturbance for the animals that live there.  Likewise, due to pandemic-intensified economic hardships, more people are turning to exploitation of wild populations for basic sustenance; on the other hand, reduced human presence in some remote places has affected the incidence of poaching. 

The anthropause is a very unique time for studying the effect that humans have on wildlife populations.  It can be assessed by examining aspects of animals' biology a) across sites that vary in pandemic-related restrictions, b) in areas typically not accessed by humans (remote or inaccessible places) compared with those that experience human influence, and c) across time spanning before and after the pandemic.  By studying wildlife populations during the pandemic, scientists have the opportunity to achieve a more detailed understanding of human-wildlife interactions.  They will be able to identify species that are seriously affected by human activity but still able to respond to change, as well as others that are particularly vulnerable.  Scientists will also be able to pinpoint more specifically the levels at which human disturbance become detrimental to animal behavior, species well-being, and ecosystem dynamics.  This information will enable us to improve human-wildlife coexistence going forward, perhaps including small changes that can be made in peoples’ lifestyles that have disproportionate benefit to wildlife populations.  This is a remarkable opportunity for reflection on the way humans fit into the global ecosystem.   

This study, “COVID-19 lockdown allows researchers to quantify the effects of human activity on wildlife” by Rutz et al. (2020) was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.