M. T. MYERS 



seas, perhaps primarily for the very same rea- 

 sons that they were previously so largely 

 ignored; namely, that they are at the top of 

 the food chains (and so accumulate the most- 

 persistent and least-degradable pollutants) 

 and that the on-land failures in their reproduc- 

 tive biology are readily visible. 



During the last 10 years, it has become evi- 

 dent that yet another fundamental science is 

 even more basic to the achievement of a bal- 

 anced and in-depth understanding of the influ- 

 ence of the environment upon seabirds the 

 combined field of astrophysics, geophysics, 

 and climatology. New developments in this 

 field (when they are not published in Nature or 

 Science) appear in journals that are less 

 familiar to seabird ornithologists than those 

 in which the fishery biologists and biological 

 oceanographers publish their findings. 



Unfortunately, important advances in 

 understanding the dynamics and energy 

 transport mechanisms of both the atmos- 

 phere and the water masses of the oceans are 

 not being picked up by students of seabirds 

 because of the natural lag in communication 

 that occurs between disparate disciplines. 

 Only in the last few years have oceanog- 

 raphers and climatologists been invited to 

 address gatherings of ornithologists, and the 

 modesty with which they have sometimes 

 done so has limited the impact of their of- 

 ferings. 



At this symposium, it was left to a biologist 

 with no pretentions in either physics or 

 mathematics to demonstrate the need for sea- 

 bird ornithologists to understand basic envi- 

 ronmental processes well beyond their usual 

 range of interests. I did so with a series of 

 slides taken from this "other" literature, and 

 I had intended to include in the published ver- 

 sion of this paper an extensive bibliography, 

 subdivided into category groupings, so that 

 seabird ornithologists could make their own 

 selection of the points in the spectrum at 

 which they most needed information. 



Unfortunately, limitations upon space in 

 this volume, daily additions to the exploding 

 literature, and my own inability to keep up 

 with understanding this have forced me to 

 omit any references and not to attempt to ex- 

 pound detailed specific physical mechanisms. 



Thus unencumbered here, I shall briefly out- 

 line instead what I perceive to be some of the 



significance for seabird ornithology and con- 

 servation of the rapidly expanding under- 

 standing of the oceans, the air-sea interface, 

 atmospheric dynamics, and influences upon 

 the world's climate of extraterrestrial events. 



Small-scale or 

 Short-term Influences 



There is no need to dwell on the well-known 

 events that could be mentioned under this 

 heading. Seabird ornithologists are familiar 

 with the fact that the atmosphere is the 

 medium of seabirds both when searching the 

 ocean for feeding areas and when on migra- 

 tion, and also a violent enemy, as when par- 

 ticular storms cause occasional "wrecks" of 

 seabirds inland from coastlines. As a refine- 

 ment of the former, Manikowski of Poland 

 suggests that seabirds respond to the passage 

 of weather systems, so that their distribution 

 over the open ocean may be constantly chang- 

 ing. Whereas some species may attempt to 

 avoid the stormy conditions of low-pressure 

 areas (cyclonic conditions), others more highly 

 specialized for exploiting the aerodynamic 

 properties of wind over a moving water sur- 

 face may possibly, instead, try to avoid large 

 high-pressure regions (anticyclonic conditions 

 with little or no wind). My student, Juan Guz- 

 man, is attempting to determine whether this 

 may be so; if it is, it might be possible, for 

 example, to predict some things about the dis- 

 tribution patterns and population structure of 

 southern hemisphere shearwaters while they 

 are visiting the oceans of the northern hemi- 

 sphere during the nonbreeding season. 



In comparison with the "wrecks" brought 

 about by storms, which are of short duration 

 and not usually very serious, seabird orni- 

 thologists are also familiar with relatively 

 brief and localized disasters caused by 

 changes in the ocean itself. The best-known 

 example is a slight change in the boundary of 

 an ocean current (or other shift in the position 

 of a distinctive water mass) that results in the 

 failure of food fishes to appear as they nor- 

 mally would, close to breeding sites of con- 

 spicuous colonial seabirds, such as the peri- 

 odic shift in the El Nino off the west coast of 

 South America. A scarcely studied refinement 

 of this type of event would be the effects of 



