(Science) Energetic bottleneck factors in catastrophic winter seabird losses

It's a terrible sight: hundreds of dead seabirds washed up on the seashore. These catastrophic events occur in the winter and are known as winter wrecks. No one knows why the birds perish, and it is almost impossible to study the animals out in stormy winter seas to find out how they meet their fate. With the birds' tough life style in mind, Jérôme Fort and David Grémillet from the CNRS Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive in France decided to try to estimate the energetic demands placed on two alcid species (little auks and Brünnich's guillemots) by their aquatic lifestyle to find out whether battling the harsh conditions may simply be too energetically demanding for the little seafarers. Fort and his colleagues publish their discovery that winter wreck victims may not be able to eat enough to survive the harsh winter conditions in the Journal of Experimental Biology on 17 July 2009 at http://jeb.biologists.org/.

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