ANOTHER LIFE:IRELAND'S MULTITUDE of puffins have almost finished their season on the islands off the west and south. There have been months of whirring flight, back and forth from the cliffs to the sea, and thousands of dives for prey, wings thrusting beneath the water.
Each pair of birds have taken turns to hatch a single chick, and both have fed it for six weeks or so, dropping the catch in the nesting burrow underneath the sea pinks. They leave the chick to fast for a final week and then to find its own way to the sea.
It's about now that young birds emerge on the clifftops in the evening for their first look at the ocean. It's only now, too, that ornithologists can begin to judge how many have survived the big change in their world - a change almost certainly due to global warming.
The prey to which the birds are long adapted are sand eels and sprats - thin, soft silvery fish almost designed for stacking crosswise - held by serrations in the puffin's bill. But as a warming Atlantic moves sand eels northwards, immense numbers of another slim fish are arriving to take their place, and adult puffins are feeding them to their young. (The photograph to the far right was taken in Kerry by Danny O'Brien, a passionate photographer who died this spring but who wished his pictorial website, porch field.com, to survive him.)
Rising temperatures at the sea surface have produced an explosion in the population of the gold-coloured snake pipefish, Entelurus aequoreus. As one of the sea-horse family it has a stiff, horny body - one simply too difficult for puffin chicks to swallow. In colonies from the Faroes to the Skelligs young birds have been starving to death amid a litter of uneaten fish. Kittiwakes, razorbills and guillemots are other birds whose decline needs an explanation.
A huge increase in the pipefish was first detected in 2002, when unprecedented numbers of its larvae began to show up in the plankton recorders drawn by ships crossing the Atlantic. They were trapped as far west as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Some ships passing the west of Ireland returned with big adult pipefish snagged on projections of the plankton-sampling gear.
The species was once relatively rare around Ireland and generally found hiding among kelp. Its main home was on the western slope of the continental shelf. Now a new centre of abundance, to the southwest of Ireland and on the Porcupine Bank, has spread them eastwards across the shelf and into the Celtic Sea.
This advance is one of the species eruptions and migrations noted in the new Marine Institute report on ocean warming and its ecosystem effects. None offers much comfort for the way we are treating the sea.
As traditional food fish, such as cod, yield finally to overexploitation, warmer water is boosting the catch of new, small species, not to eat directly but to mince up as food for salmon and other farmed fish. Among them is the boarfish, a pretty subtropical species, flushed with red and no bigger than your hand. Shoals of them swim like vertical saucers, their spiny fins a defence against predators. (They are also good at swimming backwards, fast.)
Boarfish are on the increase in the northeast Atlantic generally. An "exponential abundance increase" was reported from the Bay of Biscay, and their shoals around Ireland include even the odd one trapped in a seashore rock pool. As an unassessed stock with no management restrictions, they have been targeted by Irish trawlers since 2003 and, says the Marine Institute report, "the catch is used as feed for salmon in aquaculture and exported to Australia as crocodile feed".
You may wish to read those last words again, or even yell them out loud to anyone around. But it is probably only a matter of time before canned crocodile, in curry sauce, is shipped all the way from Australia as another welcome novelty for Ireland's supermarket shelves.
The report's references to the growing ocean abundance of jellyfish strikes a familiar note, but details are interesting. The tide of little mauve stingers that engulfed and destroyed huge numbers of salmon at a farm off Antrim in 2007 was not necessarily linked to warming - something like it has happened around these islands at least 25 times in the past century - but, judging from Mediterranean experience, long periods of warm, dry weather seem likely to increase the risk.
There is also concern about a little gelatinous animal, a Ctenophora called Mnemiopsis leidyithat could reach our shores in the near future. This is the sea walnut, or warty comb jelly, that was brought from America in tanker ballast water to the Black Sea in the 1980s and, spreading rapidly westwards, reached the North Sea in 2006. It is a voracious consumer of zooplankton, including the eggs and young of fish, and yet another invasive species Ireland's sea life could do without.
Eye on nature
A strange growth that consisted of a cluster of yellow grains, about the size of a 20c coin, appeared on our back garden gate. In a day it had grown into a smooth-surfaced hemispherical blob, two centimetres or so across, like a fine-pored sponge. A little later it stopped growing and turned a silvery metallic grey, smooth with a few wrinkles.
Darius Bartlett, Midleton, Co Cork
It is a slime mould, Fuliga septica, also known as scrambled-egg mould. Slime moulds are neither fungus nor animal life but a protist that lies between the two. Life starts as a slime that can move about. Yours is at the stage of reproduction when it produces a fungus-like growth that contains spores. They live on bacteria and fungi and are no threat to anything else.
At the end of May, in west Wicklow, a cock pheasant strolled across the road in front of my car. A few seconds later it was followed by two hen pheasants, hurrying to catch up with their lord and master. Do cock pheasants keep a harem?
David Nolan, Santry, Dublin
The male pheasant often has a harem of at least two females, which raise separate broods. The male is not involved with the young.
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address.