Within minutes of arriving on a San Diego beach, marine ornithologist Tammy Russell came across a grim sight: seabird carcasses scattered along the shoreline, some tangled in kelp, others wedged beneath rocks. It’s a scene scientists and volunteers have been documenting with growing alarm during monthly surveys along California’s coast, where a prolonged marine heat wave is taking a devastating toll on wildlife.
The decades-old surveys provide baseline data that helps researchers spot changes in marine ecosystems. In recent months, large numbers of California brown pelicans, loons, grebes and other seabirds have died from starvation as record ocean temperatures pushed the cold, nutrient-rich waters that support krill, anchovies and sardines farther offshore.
“We’ve been seeing cormorants walk to shore and then just die within the hour. One time it happened within 15 minutes, and I’ve never seen that before,” said Russell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s heartbreaking, and we’re seeing it across the whole coast.”…