Atlantic puffins face a growing welfare crisis from climate-driven shifts in prey fish distribution that reduce chick survival, combined with long-established threats from predation, pollution, and plastic ingestion.
Climate-driven prey shifts affect puffin welfare at the chick level most immediately: chicks that receive insufficient sand eels during the critical growth period fail to fledge or fledge underweight with reduced survival prospects. Parent birds expend increasing energy travelling farther to find food, experiencing cumulative physiological stress. Adults that ingest marine plastic carry it to chicks or experience gut impaction themselves. Individual puffins found oiled, entangled, or emaciated represent acute welfare crises requiring rehabilitation. The systemic welfare harm — millions of puffins experiencing reduced food availability and climate-disrupted breeding seasons — requires large-scale policy responses to climate and fisheries management.