Atlantic puffins face mounting pressures from climate-driven prey fish shifts and seabird bycatch, with breeding colony failures becoming more frequent as warming oceans alter the availability of sand eels and other prey.
Atlantic puffins experiencing prey scarcity during the breeding season face an acutely stressful situation: they must travel increasingly far from colonies to find food, extending the period that chicks are left unguarded and unfed. Chick starvation in years of poor sand eel availability causes prolonged suffering before death. Adults face physical exhaustion from extended foraging trips. At sea, puffins are vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear, oil contamination that destroys feather waterproofing, and plastic ingestion. Colony failures where no chicks fledge represent not only population loss but the welfare cost of investment without return by adult birds that bred successfully in that colony for years.