Many seabirds spend long times over the open sea and sometimes fly for weeks without major interruptions. They often meet storms that can also be life -threatening for them. As Emily Shepard from Swansea University and her team observed, at least some species even search the eye of hurricanes. This was reported by the working group in the »PNAS«.
For their study, Shepard and Co equipped shearwaters with small transmitters so that they could use the GPS data to track where the birds are drawn and how they react to weather events. The results were somewhat surprising: the birds often flew directly towards the storm center, although the wind speeds are actually highest there. This was true even for the strongest typhoon during the study period.
However, in the Northern Hemisphere, these and other hurricanes rotate counterclockwise. So if the birds had remained in their original area of residence, the strong onshore winds behind the eye of the storm might have driven them towards the mainland. However, there are many dangers lurking there for the seabirds, such as predators or collisions with mountains, trees or the numerous human structures.
This behavior usually occurred when the birds were in relative land proximity: So they also know where they are in relation to the coast. On the open sea, on the other hand, they mostly tried to avoid the storms and fly around. Both need a certain experience and can explain why, after strong storms, a disproportionately large number of dead young seabirds are rinsed on the coast, Shepard and her team write: They would not have had time to create a kind of map of their surroundings in their brain and thus stormy To escape winds.
Originally, such large losses hardly played a role in the survival of seabirds: they live very long and could therefore cope with the loss of a generation. In the meantime, however, numerous influences from human hands affect these species, for example because adult animals are killed by fishing, introduced predators or collisions with illuminated buildings. Many stocks are therefore endangered.
