Clown of the Sea

hello X

Clown of the Sea

September 11, 2018

Hey...where’s the baby food? Atlantic Puffins in Lofoten are beautiful and possibly in trouble. Puffins travel thousands of miles to gather on ancient breeding cliffs. Hardworking parents can fly 100 km a day and dive 60 m deep to find food for their chicks. But something’s not right. The herring and other small forage fish are too small and too dispersed to feed the chicks. In the last decade, almost none of the baby puffins are surviving. Could the decline in puffins and other coastal birds around the world be an indicator of big changes in our ocean ecosystems? How do scientists cope? This episode marks the beginning of a running theme on seabirds in the hello X podcast and stories.

Meet marine biologist Zoe Burr, from the UNIS (Univ. Centre of Svalbard/ Fram flagship research group on Effects of Climate Change on Coastal Ecology in the North) who studies a breeding colony of Puffins on Hernyken, one of a cluster of remote islands called Røst near Lofoten in Northern Norway. Zoe is part of a team led by Tycho Anker-Nilssen, senior researcher at the NINA (Norwegian Inst. for Nature Research) collecting long-term data on seabird colonies.

This is the first of the hello X science spotlights, interviews with researchers in the Arctic that complement the main episodes, which include both the creative development of the X fiction stories, along with shorter discussions on science.

Special thanks to:

FRAM - High North Research Centre for Climate and the Environment in Tromsø, a hello X partner, and its research program on Effects of climate change on cea and coastal ccology in the north. https://framsenteret.no/english/
UNIS- The University Centre in Svalbard https://www.unis.no/
NINA- Norwegian Institute for Nature Research https://www.nina.no/