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    Is climate change turning birds into cannibals ...?

    Kitkat
    Kitkat
    Kitkat

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    :not happy: Is climate change turning birds into cannibals ...?

    Post by Kitkat Wed 26 Jun 2019, 17:58

    Whilst parking my car in a Sainsbury's car-park yesterday, I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye going on in middle of a bay near to the one I was just about to enter.  On looking properly, I was horrified and sickened to find that a large seagull was feeding frantically upon something - turned out to be a pigeon (what was left of it!), that it had obviously just killed!  Trapped under its large webbed feet (the creature was at least four times bigger than the pigeon - it may actually have been literally eaten alive and consequently to death.  (There is a canal quite close to the Sainsbury's superstore in question.)

    On returning home, I looked up online to see would a gull actually eat another bird, and found this:

    'Climate change turns birds into cannibals'

    Could climate change be turning some species into cannibals? No, not humans — not yet, anyway. We’ve already seen polar bears and lobster eat their own kind for sustenance, thanks to melting ice and rising water temperatures.
    Now, you can add Washington State’s gull population to that list. In the Pacific Northwest researchers have noticed a disturbing trend: As sea temperatures rise, plankton have dropped into lower, colder waters; fish have followed the plankton down. Gulls, which can no longer find enough food in shallow waters, have turned to eating each other’s chicks.
    “It doesn’t seem like a lot, but a one-tenth of a degree change in seawater temperature correlates to a 10 percent increase in (the odds of) cannibalism,” said Jim Hayward, a seabird biologist, according to the Associated Press.
    In the past 60 years, the Pacific Ocean has been warming 15 times the rate as any measured in 10,000 years.
    If the gulls’ food-scarcity situation doesn’t improve, Hayward worries that “super cannibals” could evolve: A bird adapted to feed exclusively off its own species.
    https://grist.org/article/climate-change-turns-birds-into-cannibals/

    and many more examples - of gulls eating a whole crow, a rat and other horrible unimaginable scenarios. pale

    The fella I saw was all white and much bigger than the one in this film:   Crying or Very sad

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