Biologists bag bird barf to study Arctic pollution

You don’t want to approach nesting fulmars or they’re liable to attack you with the oily, orange goo that they also feed to their chick-which is now being studied by researchers because it also contains contaminants from agricultural and industrial activities, located far to the south. The oil is the orange splotch near the centre of the photo. (PHOTO BY MARK MALLORY)

Seabird researchers looking for non-invasive ways to collect samples from birds have developed a novel sampling technique for fulmars.

To collect samples of this stomach oil, researchers have found that they can hold on to a fulmar and slip a plastic whirlpak bag, similar to a zip-lock baggie, over the beak.

Then, when the bird projects the oil, the goo flies right into a bag, to be transferred later to glass vials and frozen. After the sampling, the fulmar simply returns to the nest.

The method doesn’t harm the birds, yet produces samples of the fulmar stomach oil needed to study contaminants.

The oil, made of shrimp and other tiny sea creatures which these High Arctic birds make to feed their chicks, can be yellow or orange- and “it’s a really fishy smelling oil,” Karen Foster, a graduate student at the University of Ottawa, told Nunatsiaq News.

The fulmars also spit this goo out at intruders.

“Anytime you approach these birds they spew it out at you,” Foster said.

If the intruders are other birds, the goo can coat their feathers, prevents them from flying or swimming, causing them to drown or freeze.

It’s worth going to the trouble of collecting stomach oil because researchers like Foster can analyze this oil, which has been found to contain toxic industrial and agricultural contaminants, such as mercury, PCBs and DDT.

Fulmar stomach oil contains lot of contaminants because as they eat, they convert and concentrate a portion of their fish and shrimp diet into oils. They store these fats in a special stomach, and then cough up this contaminant-filled goo into the beaks of their hungry chicks or spit it out at predators.

After Foster measured high levels of PCBs and DDT in the stomach oils of two fulmars from Cape Vera on Devon Island, she wondered whether these elevated concentrations were typical for fulmars in general.

So she approached a researcher in Alaska who extracted the stomach oils of fulmars there for study.

The oils from 10 fulmars nesting on St. George Island also showed similarly elevated levels of PCBs and DDT.

The levels were 10 times greater in the fulmar oils than in whole fish and nearly 20 times greater than in whole shrimp, which means fulmar chicks receive a lot of contaminants in their diet.

Over time, researchers hope to see if any problems develop with fulmars- or if the levels of the contaminants change.

The results of this study, recently published in the journal Environmental Science, is the first study of stomach oils and the first relying on this non-invasive way of seeing what birds eat and how many contaminants they consume.

The findings also underline the need for more environmentally-sound practices to cut down on contaminants in fish and shellfish.

Mark Mallory of the Canadian Wildlife Service in Iqaluit has also looked at the colony of 20,000 fulmars at Cape Vera, where he found contaminant levels in sediments from 11 ponds up to 60 times higher than those found at nearby sites where there are no seabird populations.

That’s because when fulmars nest on cliffs, ringed by freshwater ponds at the bottom, their excrement flows down into these ponds below, along with the contaminants they eat and pass on to their chicks.