Atlantic puffins are seabirds facing declining food availability from climate-driven shifts in prey fish distribution. Their welfare and population viability are increasingly threatened by warming oceans.
Puffin welfare is a vivid example of how ocean ecosystem disruption translates into individual animal suffering. When sand eels — the primary chick food — are unavailable near puffin colonies during the critical chick-rearing period, parents make increasingly long foraging trips returning with unsuitable prey substitutes. Chicks that receive inadequate nutrition experience slow starvation over days to weeks — a prolonged welfare harm that, when affecting entire colonies, represents suffering at enormous scale. Breeding failure years, where whole colonies rear no chicks, eliminate suffering but also eliminate reproduction, driving population decline. Adult puffins that cannot find food are also at risk of nutritional stress during the high-energy demands of the breeding season. Long-term puffin welfare requires both marine protected areas and addressing the climate change driving ocean warming.