PORT TOWNSEND — A lecture on puffins will expand their image as cute, fluffy seabirds to tough, agile and resilient survivors of the harsh northern seas.
John Piatt, Ph.D., director of the World Puffin Congress, will speak at 3 p.m. Sunday at Fort Worden’s Wheeler Theater, 25 Eisenhower Ave. The free lecture is a part of Port Townsend Marine Science Center’s Future of Oceans lecture series.
Much of Piatt’s career centered on practical studies asking questions about problems facing seabirds in Alaska and how to address them. Of central importance to his work was the alcid family, which includes auklets, murres and puffins.
The birds can dive to great depths, essentially flying underwater, Piatt said. They are incredibly mobile on land, underwater and in the sky.
Pacific Puffins can dive to depths of 450 feet, and Atlantic Puffins can dive down to 200 feet, Piatt said. Underwater, they propel themselves forward at speeds of 2 meters per second.
Piatt noted that Thick Billed Murres can reach depths of 600 feet.
Their capacity for depth and speed make them fierce marine predators.
“You know schools (of fish), how fast they are when predators approach them,” Piatt said.
Early in his career, Piatt came to understand that the key to understanding the survival of a population is understanding its food source.
For all of their survival advantages, puffins have a related weakness. They require half of their body weight in food on a daily basis.
“If they don’t get anything and they’re burning up the energy, (if) they’re not putting any coal in the stove for two days, they die,” Piatt said.
Sunday’s lecture will cover the challenges that face the birds as well as the characteristics that set them apart.
Piatt’s passion for birds came from a childhood friend in Newfoundland, where he was raised. Soon his attention turned to seabirds.
Building on his seabird-watching hobby, Piatt eventually was hired to a position as a naturalist at a seabird colony.
After he completed his Ph.D. in biochemistry, Piatt expected to work in laboratories. When his career began, Piatt had not yet learned that working in the field with the birds that fascinated him was even a career.
“Then I got a phone call from somebody back in Newfoundland who was looking for someone to do surveys in Labrador in the eastern Arctic, counting birds and whales,” Piatt said. “And I was like, ‘What? You can get paid for that?’”
Piatt’s work as a naturalist was low-wage. At the time, he was being offered career-wage work.
After a time working on the bird and whale surveys, Piatt received another call, this time from someone offering him a position working with murres in Alaska.
His first job in Alaska was a one-year contract which saw him collecting data on murres and auklets on St. Lawrence Island.
“I lived out there in the (St. Lawrence Island Yupik) village and then went down — we were about 40 to 50 miles from the nearest village. We camped in this beautiful rocky basin and we were surrounded by auklets, like a million birds,” he said.
Piatt spent 37 years, mostly employed by the U.S. Geological Survey, the research branch of the U.S. Department of Interior, studying seabirds across Alaska, using them as indicators of what was happening in marine food webs.
Much of his work focused on murres and puffins, tracking their feeding and responses to changing ocean conditions.
His career was profoundly influenced by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which occurred two years after he began working in Alaska. Piatt helped document seabird mortality and co-authored research estimating how many birds were killed, work that became central evidence in scientific and legal assessments of the spill’s impact.
Piatt said that, while estimate numbers varied, he suspects 300,000 seabirds died as a result of the spill.
The Port Townsend Marine Science Center’s Future of Oceans program brings scientists and researchers to Port Townsend to explain how changing ocean conditions affect wildlife, fisheries and coastal communities. The talks translate research into issues relevant to the North Olympic Peninsula.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
