
Puffins are in trouble - blondie9x
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/29/climate/puffins-dwindling-iceland.html
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jgraham
People might also be interested in the Guardian article [1], which
concentrated on the precipitous decline of Puffin numbers in Shetland.
Compared to places where the drop has not been so steep, it seems that the
birds are having to travel much further to find food (hundreds of kilometers
in some cases), which is linked to changes in sea temperatures as a result of
global warming; as sea temperatures change plankton are not available at the
right time to feed sand eel larvae and so there aren't so many sand eels for
the puffins to eat.

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/03/shetland...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/03/shetland-
seabirds-climate-change-catastrophe-terns-kittiwakes-puffins)

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newfie_bullet
I live in Newfoundland and here the Puffin (our provincial bird) is doing
really well [1]. The town where I'm from I can drive 5 minutes to two separate
puffin nesting sites and in the city where I live I can get to a colony of
300,000 in ~20mins. Not trying to diminish the issues seen by the Iceland
birds but I'm glad they appear to be doing well here. Great for our tourism
too. (Should also note that they can't be hunted here either)

[1]: [https://ca.news.yahoo.com/puffins-aplenty-newfoundland-
despi...](https://ca.news.yahoo.com/puffins-aplenty-newfoundland-despite-
struggling-survive-globally-201657180.html)

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grovesNL
I'm glad they're still doing well in Newfoundland. I always enjoyed spotting
them on the small island next to Cape Bonavista Lighthouse.

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throwaway5752
To summarize: it's climate change. Just working it's way up the food chain
until it impacts the apex predator on this planet.

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esaym
Eh, you left off the hunters "killed hundreds" per day part...

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FactolSarin
This is only tangentially related to the article, but if you have small
children I can't recommend Puffin Rock enough as a kids show. It teaches
really simple environmental messages in a very subtle way while being
absolutely adorable and fun to watch.

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newfie_bullet
I love that Chris O'Dowd [1] does the narration. Great mix of calming accent
and my enjoyment of the IT crowd.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_O%27Dowd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_O%27Dowd)

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creaghpatr
Anyone who wants to passively save some puffins should eat Puffins the cereal.

[http://barbaras.com/community/project-
puffin/](http://barbaras.com/community/project-puffin/)

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blondie9x
When the adults can’t catch enough to feed themselves and the chicks, they
make an instinctive Malthusian choice; the chicks starve. Dr. Fayet called her
quest “heartbreaking”: “You put your hand in the burrow and feel with your
hand a little ball on the floor, but then you realize it’s cold, and not
moving.”

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heybrandons
What can we do to help?

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f_allwein
Global warming may be slowed down to less catastrophic levels if society
changes to live more sustainably, most importantly by burning less fossil
fuel. Vote for political parties who support this, lobby your elected
representatives to push for sustainable policies. Try to convince as many
people as possible that this an issue we need to address now.

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driverdan
Why does a GPS tracker cost $800? What's special about it that pushes the cost
so high?

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elipsey
I don't know about GPS trackers, but my experience with scientific sensors in
general has been that they tend to be quite expensive when compared to similar
commodity items. They need to be in robust waterproof housings, compatible
with other proprietary equipment and software, and accessible to non-
programmers and newbs. I have seen things less fancy then a GPS tracker, like
temperature or water level sensors with a few kb of storage and a serial port,
that easily exceed $800 cost. This is frustrating to scientists, and many use
substitute consumer equipment, roll their own when they can, or substitute
cheap labor for overpriced automation. Sometimes an undergrad research
assistant with sneaker-net is cheaper then then sensors' proprietary
networking module. Most of this stuff has a "stuck in the 90's" kind of feel
to it. 9600b serial ports, ncurses looking vendor software and propriety radio
instead of wifi or cellular. Which would be cool if it was free and open, but
it's not.

I think it's low-volume, high margin market, and not very competitive. An
opportunity perhaps?

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ehavener
sure sounds like an opportunity

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TheBeardKing
TLDR: Warming oceans lead to the decline of sand eels which they feed to their
young.

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mattigames
Maybe the presence of 7,646,237,844 people in the world has something to do
with it; at the end of the day for as sad as it seems the best thing it could
happen to wildlife is a plague that only affects humans (perhaps a plague that
sterilizes us would suffice)

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lisper
Or we could just, you know, _decide_ to have fewer kids.

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mattigames
If there is one thing humans can't clearly do is agree on something; so I'm
afraid that is not an option, specially since the desire to have kids is one
of the most hard-wired desires in sexual organisms.

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lisper
If ever there was a self-fulfilling prophecy, that's it. There's a first time
for everything. And in fact, there's a proven way to make people decide to
have fewer kids: make them rich. People in more affluent societies generally
choose to have fewer kids, to the point where the fertility rate in some
places (Japan, Italy) is below the replacement rate. So it clearly can be
done.

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Nib9fith
Wealth is just a proxy. What lowers the reproduction rate is higher living
standards. And having all humans on current industrialized nation living
standards with current methods of production certainly would not make things
more sustainable.

If you want sustainability you either need fewer humans or clean up the entire
supply chain. And the latter might just suffer from jevon's paradox.

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lisper
I didn't say it would be easy to get from A to B. But it's not impossible.

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Nib9fith
It's also possible that someone discovers a way to build a cheap commercial
fusion power plant tomorrow. But we generally don't rely on these kinds of
remote possibilities.

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ecolonsmak
Too many people.

