A website exists which considers the issue of light pollution affecting nocturnal breeding seabirds, a subject regularly covered in ACAP Latest News (click here).

Newell's Shearwater: at risk to light pollution on Hawaii, photograph by Eric Vanderwerf

“On archipelagos worldwide, high numbers of fledglings of different seabird species are attracted to artificial lights during their first flights to the sea.  Grounded birds are vulnerable to starvation, predation, dehydration and collision with vehicles.  Rescue campaigns are carried out in many places, but only a few have been documented.

This website is dedicated to the study of this phenomenon and to the improvement of conservation actions.  It is intended for seabird researchers and managers involved in rescue campaigns who are willing to share knowledge, skills, experience and literature.”

The website currently requires approval to join and is password protected (click here).

For more information contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 09 September 2015

Peter Ryan (FitzPatrick Institute University of Cape Town, South Africa) has provided a commentary in the journal Environmental Pollution on residence times of plastic items ingested by procellariiform seabirds.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“Understanding how rapidly seabirds excrete or regurgitate ingested plastic items is important for their use as monitors of marine debris.   van Franeker and Law (2015) inferred that fulmarine petrels excrete ∼75% of plastic particles within a month of ingestion based on decreases in the amounts of plastic in the stomachs of adult petrels moving to relatively clean environments to breed. However, similar decreases occur among resident species due to adults passing plastic loads to their chicks.  The few direct measures of wear rates and retention times of persistent stomach contents suggest longer plastic residence times in most albatrosses and petrels.  Residence time presumably varies with item size, type of plastic, the amount and composition of other persistent stomach contents, and the size at which items are excreted, which may vary among taxa.  Accurate measures of ingested plastic retention times are needed to better understand temporal and spatial patterns in ingested plastic loads within marine organisms, especially if they are to be used as indicators of plastic pollution trends.”

Ingested plastic artefacts within a decomposed corpse of a Laysan Albatross chick on Midway Atoll, photograph by Chris Jordan

Click here to access the Van Franeker & Law (2015) paper.

Reference:

Ryan, P.G. 2015.  How quickly do albatrosses and petrels digest plastic particles?  Environmental Pollution doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2015.08.005.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 08 September 2015

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) is an inter-disciplinary committee of the International Council for Science (ICSU).  SCAR is “charged with initiating, developing and coordinating high-quality international scientific research in the Antarctic region, and on the role of the Antarctic region in the Earth system”.  Next year SCAR will be holding the next in its regular series of biennial SCAR Open Science Conferences in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia over 22-26 August.  The conference forms part of the 34th Meeting of SCAR, to be held over 20-31 August at the same venue (click here).

Southern Ocean seabird par excellence: the Light-mantled Sooty Albatross, photograph by Aleks Terauds

As well as four plenary lectures, the conference will hold five “mini-symposia”, two of which will have an environmental theme:

MS 2.  Connecting the biological and the physical: environmental drivers of biodiversity in Antarctica; and

MS 3. Linking Antarctic Science with Environmental Protection: celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Madrid Protocol.

In addition, the conference currently plans a total of 41 sessions on a wide range of subjects, with several having an environmental theme.  Session descriptions will be available in “the coming months” on the conferemce website after conveners have been selected.  Abstracts may be submitted from 1 October with details on registration still to come on the conference website.

SCAR’s region of interest includes the Southern Ocean and its sub-Antarctic islands, home to the majority of ACAP-listed albatrosses and petrels.

The previous SCAR Open Science Conference was held in New Zealand in 2014.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 07 September 2015

The International Plan of Action for Reducing Incidental Catch of Seabirds in Longline Fisheries (IPOA-Seabirds) was developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 1998.  The plan encourages all FAO member countries to implement their own National Plans of Action (NPOA-Seabirds).

In terms of the IPOA-Seabirds, countries first assess the seabird by-catch problem within their fisheries and/or within their coastal waters.  If a bycatch problem is found to exist, each country should then develop and implement its own National Plan of Action (NPOA-Seabirds), based on the recommendations listed in the IPOA-Seabirds.

So far, fifteen countries and political entities have adopted their NPOA-Seabirds (click here), including Uruguay which has now published a revised version of its original 2006 plan.

Uruguay's 2015 NPOA-Seabirds

A Black-browed Albatross gets caught on a longline off Uruguay, photograph by Marin Abreu

In the same booklet, Uruguay also includes the text of its NPOA-Sharks, gives a description of Uruguayan fisheries and sets out the legal framework for the implementation of NPOAs.

Of the 13 Parties to ACAP six (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, South Africa and Uruguay) have produced NPOA-seabirds or allied documents, and three others (France, Spain and the United Kingdom) are covered by an NPOA-Seabirds produced by the European Union.  Non-Party range states and entities that have produced NPOA-Seabirds include Canada, Chinese Taipei, Japan and the United States of America, with Namibia’s plan expected to be formally adopted in the near future.

With thanks to Sebastián Jiménez for information and Martin Abreu for the photograph.

References:

Domingo, A., Jimenéz, S. & Passadore, A. 2007.  Plan de Acción Nacional para Reducir la Captura Incidental de Aves Marinas en las Pesquerías Uruguayas.  Montevideo: Dirreción Nacional de Recurcos Acuáticos.  75 pp.

Jiménez, S., Pin, O. & Domingo, A. 2015. Plan de Acción Nacional para Reducir la Captura Incidental de Aves Marinas en las Pesquerías Uruguayas, 2015.  In: Domingo, A., Forselledo, R. & Jiménez, S. (Eds).  Revisión de Planes de Acción Nacional para la Conservación de Aves Marinas y Condrictios en las Pesquerías Uruguayas.  Montevideo: Dirección Nacional de Recursos Acuáticos.  pp. 11-79.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 06 September 2015