Seabird colonies face growing welfare pressure from human disturbance, climate-driven prey shifts and extreme weather events, with colony-level impacts cascading to individual welfare outcomes.
Seabird welfare at colony scale reflects the intersection of individual suffering and population-level impacts. A flushed guillemot abandoning its egg on a cold cliff face, a gannet chick starving because sand eels have shifted north with warming seas, a puffin exhausted from long foraging trips searching for prey - these individual welfare events accumulate to the colony-level declines we observe in population surveys. Human disturbance at colonies is both an immediate individual welfare problem and a long-term population threat. Climate-driven prey shifts represent a welfare crisis on a scale that dwarfs direct human disturbance, requiring system-level responses to greenhouse gas emissions.