It’s just a few numbers, after all, but mind-blowing when you think about it…
Travelling on a route frequented by 20m of his closest friends, the Sooty Shearwater (which looks like a gray seagull to me) travels 64,00 km each year. Sometimes it works out to 910km in a single day, and the bird dives 68m under water in search of food along the way.
68m deep is nearly 8 atmospheres of pressure, or about 100 lbs/in2. That’s four times the pressure inside your car tires.
A bird does that. Collectively they make up about 16,000 metric tons of squawking, fluttering carniverous biomass redistributing the nutrient value of fish, squid, and krill across the ocean. How little we understand the ecology, let alone the creatures in it.
We just learned a bunch more about the Sooty Shearwater because scientists fitted some of them with tiny recording devices that kept itty-bitty journals along the trip. That’s pretty amazing in itself.
Wow.
Attention humans: Mother Earth is trying to get our attention.