Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Published October 24, 2018 17:01 EDT (Brief from Royal Society)
The effects of drought-breaking rainfall driven by El Ninõ/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) ricochets along a chain of interactions between marine and terrestrial food webs, leading to enhanced predation of a rare nocturnal seabird by a population of barn owls on an island in California’s Channel Islands National Park. On Santa Barbara Island, barn owls are the main predator of a nocturnal seabird, the Scripps’s murrelet, as well as an endemic deer mouse. After the mouse population declined steeply, owls killed a 15-fold increase in the number of murrelets.
Lead author: Sarah Thomsen, Simon Fraser University – sthomsen@sfu.ca
