Atlantic puffins face food scarcity as ocean warming shifts fish distributions. Understanding their welfare challenges helps drive meaningful conservation responses to climate-driven seabird decline.
Ocean warming creates welfare harms for individual puffins through nutritional stress during the breeding season when adults must simultaneously maintain their own energy balance while provisioning rapidly growing chicks. Chicks fed insufficient quantities of appropriate prey species grow slowly, have compromised immune systems, and are abandoned when parent foraging trips become too costly. Adult puffins during food shortages experience chronic energy deficit that compromises their own condition and long-term survival. The welfare impacts compound over successive poor years as breeding adults enter each season with reduced body condition. Climate action that slows ocean warming is the only long-term solution to puffin food stress welfare, while marine protected areas that support prey fish populations provide shorter-term benefits.