Overfishing of small pelagic fish including sand eels and herring has depleted the prey base for seabirds including puffins, terns, and gannets, causing chick starvation and colony abandonment with major welfare implications.
Chick starvation in colonial seabirds is a welfare catastrophe that plays out over weeks as adults return repeatedly with insufficient or no food and chicks progressively weaken. Adults experience their own energetic stress from searching larger areas for depleted prey. The welfare cost multiplies across thousands of individuals in affected colonies over multiple breeding seasons. Fisheries management that protects seabird prey species is both conservation and welfare intervention.