Atlantic puffins face compounding welfare challenges from ocean warming, prey decline, and plastic pollution that require coordinated conservation action.
Puffin welfare in declining colonies reflects the cumulative impacts of multiple simultaneous threats. In years when sand eels are scarce or inaccessible due to cold weather or distribution shifts, puffin parents make desperate and increasingly long-distance foraging trips to find food, returning less frequently with smaller prey quantities. Chicks that receive insufficient food decline rapidly in body condition and die from starvation over several days — a welfare harm that is both acute for individual birds and occurring at scale across affected colonies. Plastic pollution ingested by adults accumulates in the gut and toxins are transferred to eggs and chicks. Addressing these threats requires ocean management at scales far beyond any individual action, making systemic policy change the most important welfare leverage point.