Offshore, basking shark and various species of whale and dolphin can be seen regularly, and the remoter islands' seabird populations are of international significance.
The puffins in this new study, conducted by the Audubon Society's Project Puffin restoration program, nested at the Seal Island National Wildlife Refuge, a remote 65-acre seabird haven 20 miles from the mainland.
Here we investigate the role of guano on corals reefs across scales by analyzing the stable nitrogen isotopic (δ15N) values of the scleractinian coral Pocillopora damicornis on fringing reefs around two Pacific remote islets with large seabird colonies.
Finally, given the challenges of studying the impact of nutrients on corals in isolation of other anthropogenic stressors (e.g., heavy metals, human eutrophication), remote islets with nesting seabird populations provide an ideal study system to investigate how nutrient enrichment in general can affect marine environments.
Climate change looms as a further hammer to birds but Franzen has argued conservationists have gravitated to climate campaigning at the detriment of more immediate threats, such as the loss of wetlands or, in the case of seabirds in remote locales, rats that eat hapless chicks alive.
Local nutrient enrichment from seabird guano at remote islets can then be quite substantial, since NOx concentrations at Surprise and Reynard were much higher even than the ones found in the Sainte-Marie urban site close to Nouméa city (×10 at 10 m and 25 m, and ×2 at 50 m).
This is a story about global warming and a scientist named George Divoky, who studies a colony of Arctic seabirds on a remote barrier island off the northern coast of Alaska.
Like seabirds and turtles, remote islands serve as sentinels for the health of the wider marine ecosystem, "acting like a sieve or a trap, filtering out the ocean", she said.
Members of the public are being asked to record sounds of the coastline – whether it be the busy sounds of a working fishing village, the cries of seabirds on a remote island, the whistle of a beach-hut kettle, or a seaside arcade – and upload them to a sound map hosted on the British Library website to be added to its sound archive.
