Abstract
Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous.
Keywords: Seabirds, oceans, uncertainty
Introduction
A good introduction is a funnel. A funnel takes an otherwise unruly amount of material and feeds it through a small opening. It is a tool not so much of order as of constraint. Here, the unruly amount of material is the ecological state of the world. But we constrained ourselves to the changing nature of the ocean, and how that change affects some of the things that depend on it. That is a topic we can reasonably wrap our heads around, given the areas of our expertise.
We focused on birds. (We happen to like birds.) One species in particular, in one particular place. We have been watching this bird in this place for a while. During that time the ocean went through an especially severe change that lasted a few years. Thousands and thousands of animals died—not just birds, and not just here. (We are still determining the extent of the loss.) Then conditions returned more or less to “normal.” Whatever that means anymore.
We wanted to know how the birds we watched fared. More broadly, we want to know how they will survive in this world we’re making for them. But we can’t phrase our research question quite that way, so we will say something like: Given such-and-such marine states that we believe we can measure with some degree of accuracy, what did the birds do? How many laid an egg in a burrow, how many chicks hatched from those eggs, how many of those chicks survived to set off on their own?
To refine our thinking we reviewed the literature. It was often contradictory. We are left with our simple questions. Some of the answers were easier to come by than others. Here we report a few of the former.
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