To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. The soup is so cold that its diversity is low, but the cold-water specialists that are adapted to it do incredibly well. That’s how the thick, green soup that feeds the Gulf’s food web gets made. At the surface, microscopic plants called phytoplankton combine those nutrients with the sunlight of the lengthening spring days to reproduce like mad. Whipped by that vortex, and churned by the largest tides in the world (52 feet in one bay), the Gulf of Maine acts like a giant blender, constantly whisking nutrients up off the bottom, where they generally settle. (I’m looking at you, Old Orchard Beach!) Meanwhile, frigid, nutrient-rich water from off the coasts of Labrador and Nova Scotia feeds into the Gulf through a deep channel and gets sucked into the powerful counterclockwise currents. Warm water surging up the East Coast glances off those banks and heads for Europe, bypassing the Gulf of Maine and leaving it shockingly cold. A submerged ridge between Cape Cod and the tip of Nova Scotia turns it into a nearly self-contained bowl. On a map,the Gulf of Maine looks like an unremarkable bulge of the North Atlantic, but it is unique. He saw dead chicks and piles of rotting butterfish everywhere. Then he checked the other 64 burrows he was tracking: Only 31 percent had successfully fledged. It’s normal to have some chicks die.” Puffins successfully raise chicks 77 percent of the time, and Petey’s parents had a good track record Kress assumed they were just unlucky. “But we thought, ‘Well, that’s nature.’ They don’t all live. “When he died, there was a huge outcry from viewers,” Kress tells me. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. Eventually, he began moving less and less. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. But Petey’s parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. Researchers would get to watch live puffin feeding behavior for the first time, and schoolkids around the world would be falling for Petey.īut Kress soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffin parents dote on their single chick, sheltering it in a two-foot burrow beneath rocky ledges and bringing it piles of small fish each day. Now, thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Puffin Cam offered new opportunities for research and outreach. By 2013, about 1,000 puffin pairs were nesting in Maine. Project Puffin transplanted young puffins from Newfoundland to several islands in Maine, and after years of effort the colonies were reestablished and the project became one of Audubon’s great success stories. Puffins, whose orange bills and furrowed eyes make them look like penguins dressed as sad clowns, used to nest on many islands off the Maine coast, but 300 years of hunting for their meat, eggs, and feathers nearly wiped them out. The “Puffin Cam” capturing baby Petey’s every chirp had been set up on Maine’s Seal Island by Stephen Kress, “The Puffin Man,” who founded the Audubon Society’s Project Puffin in 1973. The new poster childfor climate change had his coming-out party in June 2012, when Petey the puffin chick first went live into thousands of homes and schools all over the world.
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