Fish Numbers Plummet in Warming Pacific

By Geoffrey Lean
The Independent UK

Sunday 13 November 2005

Disappearance of plankton causes unprecedented collapse in sea and bird life off western US coast.

San Francisco - A catastrophic collapse in sea and bird life numbers along America's Northwest Pacific seaboard is raising fears that global warming is beginning to irreparably damage the health of the oceans.

<>Scientists say a dramatic rise in the ocean temperature led to unprecedented deaths of birds and fish this summer all along the coast from central California to British Columbia in Canada.

The population of seabirds, such as cormorants, auklets and murres, and fish, including salmon and rockfish, fell to record lows.

This ecological meltdown mirrors a similar development taking place thousands of miles away in the North Sea, which The Independent on Sunday first reported two years ago. Also caused by warming of the water, the increase in temperatures there has driven the plankton that form the base of the marine food chain hundreds of miles north, triggering a collapse in the number of sand eels on which many birds and large fish feed and causing a rapid decline in puffins, razorbills, kittiwakes and other birds.