Atlantic puffins are charismatic seabirds whose breeding success is collapsing in some colonies as climate change disrupts the timing and abundance of their sand eel prey during chick-rearing season.
Puffin chick starvation during sand eel failures represents a welfare crisis that plays out across thousands of individual animals during each poor breeding season. Puffin parents make hundreds of foraging trips during chick rearing, returning with beakfuls of sand eels; when sand eels are scarce or unavailable within the parents foraging range, chicks slowly starve over days in their burrows. Parents that cannot find prey may abandon chicks before fledging to preserve their own survival. Chicks that survive to fledging in poor condition have lower first-year survival rates. The adults are not suffering directly during these events, but breeding failure year after year depletes the population as the long-lived adults die without replacing themselves. The welfare of individual chicks during starvation events, and the cumulative population trajectory, both argue for urgent action on climate change and industrial sand eel fishing management.