Atlantic puffins face declining reproductive success as climate change shifts fish distributions away from their breeding colonies, leaving chicks to starve during the critical rearing period.
Puffin chicks dying of starvation in burrows experience prolonged suffering as parents who cannot find adequate prey nearby are unable to provision them adequately. Adult puffins exhausting themselves flying ever-longer distances to find food experience significant energetic stress. The mismatch between climate-driven prey shifts and the fixed location of breeding colonies — where puffins return year after year despite declining food availability — creates a welfare trap from which individual birds cannot easily escape. The welfare of individual puffins and the population-level consequences of decline are both driven by the same root cause: ocean warming from climate change.