Atlantic puffins face collapsing food supplies as climate change shifts sand lance and herring distributions away from traditional nesting colonies, causing widespread chick starvation and breeding failure.
Puffin chick starvation is a welfare event of enormous scale in years when sand lance populations are low - thousands of chicks dying slowly from hunger across colonies from Maine to Norway. Parent puffins make hundreds of foraging trips that fail to deliver sufficient calories for chick growth. The adults cannot modify their foraging behavior fast enough to compensate for prey distribution shifts driven by temperature changes. Individual welfare cannot be addressed without addressing the systemic ocean warming that is disrupting the prey base.