George and the Junk-food Hypothesis
There I was, tagging along with the Arctic Research Commission on a tour behind the scenes of the new Seward Sea Life Center, when I encountered an unexpected chance to follow up on an earlier column.
The center has handsome, informative displays and spectacular deep tanks that give observers a stunning view of some of Alaska's marine creatures. Puffins and other seabirds paddle about and dive deep in one huge tank while sea lions and harbor seals perform underwater ballet in others, all--from surface to bottom--in full sight of enthralled spectators. It's wonderful.
But the Sea Life Center is a bit like the tundra swans that float elsewhere on Alaska's waters: the movement you can see above the surface looks effortless, but there's a lot of hard work going on beneath. Underlying the public portion of the Sea Life Center is a spaceship's worth of life-support systems and a college's worth of laboratories. And in one of those labs, we found new Ph.D. George Divoky, hard at work.
Divoky's research in the Arctic on providing housing for black guillemots and checking their home-turf loyalty, mentioned in a column early this year, earned him a doctorate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Now he's in Seward, constructing a new home for some relatives of his former subjects and checking on how different diets affect young seabirds' growth and health.
Pigeon guillemots, his present study subjects, were apparently hit hard by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Their slow and only partial recovery worries biologists; one explanation suggests that some seabirds and mammals, such as sea lions, are suffering because they are eating less nutritious foods. Good food--that is, high-energy, fatty marine organisms--may be less readily available than it was some years ago, for reasons still being debated. As this hypothesis has it, a lot of Alaska sea life is being forced to subsist on the oceanic equivalent of popcorn and soft drinks.
So, to investigate this, Divoky has a flock of young pigeon guillemots growing up on controlled diets. The guillemots live in food-shipping buckets recycled from the Spring Creek prison on the other side of Resurrection Bay (a very economical ploy). We tourists watched while Divoky's student assistants proffered arrays of small fishes, sorted by species, to the birdlets. The food fishes are all imported from Outside (not so economical). Seward's local fisherfolk have not yet caught on to the income possible from supplying specific baitfish to the denizens of the Sea Life Center. The young guillemots could earn someone a profit all by themselves, since they seem to be always hungry. Divoky showed us a guillemot chick, an indignant ball of black fluff that spent the whole time out of its bucket trying to ingest his thumb. He showed us an older bird, a fully feathered juvenile nearly ready to leave the nest; it tried to gape its bill around his whole hand, and protested its failure to do so by pooping mightily on his shoes. These pigeon guillemots are being observed and measured while they grow, and perhaps their reactions will help answer some of the questions now afloat in Alaska's seas. In autumn, the last one will leave its laboratory home. Some may return to found a new colony.
The other part of Divoky's project was to build another residential development for guillemots, this one a kind of condominium. A multi-family nest box now stands atop part of an old seawall just offshore of the center. Thanks to Fairbanks' natural-sound recordist Kathy Turco, it sounds like home: a CD playing what Divoky calls "Greatest Hits of the Pigeon Guillemots" provides the right background babble. It has decoy pigeon guillemots standing guard; their fiberglass feathers and black-and-white paint jobs were realistic enough to confuse a few hungry ravens, though briefly, and a distinguished ornithologist from California, for a bit longer.
Maybe by spring, the manmade rookery will fool some real guillemots into moving in.
