Study Image Credit – Image Credit: ANI Paris: Climate change could push sea birds into smaller habitats and force them to fly farther to survive, a new study said on Tuesday. While warmer oceans have historically shrunk the size of fish and other marine species, the study said sea birds such as albatrosses, shearwaters and petrels have seen their geographic ranges contract.

The researchers used statistical models to look at how seabirds cope with climate change over millions of years and project what their future might look like. As such, “in both scenarios we saw the same answer: each time, when the climate changed rapidly. the range of distribution (of sea birds) started to decline, to shrink, to get smaller,” Jorge Avaria-Llautureau, lead author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change, told AFP.

Postdoctoral researchers from the University of Reading in Britain and their colleagues studied more than 120 species of Procellariiformes. As climate change intensifies, suitable habitat for these seabirds shrinks and their mortality rates increase, Avaria-Llauturio said.

The survivors, he said, “will migrate in search of new habitable habitat that offers optimal conditions for survival and reproduction. ” The researcher said. “The important factor is that seabirds vary in their dispersal ability.

” The further these suitable habitats are located in the future, the less likely it is that birds with limited flight ability will be able to successfully reach them, increasing their risk of extinction under projected scenarios of rapid global warming. In the worst-case warming scenario, 70 percent of species will shrink their range by 2100, with four of them most at risk of extinction – the Galápagos petrel, jaune petrel, Newell’s shearwater and white-vented storm petrel.