Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Are the Cat Birds Getting Eaten by the Dog Sharks?


Are the Cat Birds getting eaten by the Dog Sharks? 

Of course they are. As the American Bird Conservancy notes:

Researchers at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, who have been conducting a two year study focusing on the diets of Tiger Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico, have made a surprising discovery: not only are the sharks feeding on fish and other marine organisms, they are also feeding on land-based birds, such as woodpeckers, tanagers, meadowlarks, catbirds, kingbirds, and swallows.

“We were not expecting to see this. It certainly prompts a series of questions, the most obvious being, how does a land bird end up in the water as food for sharks?

What's to blame? One theory is that lighted offshore oil and gas platforms attract the birds which then get trapped in a cone of light, circling around until they get exhausted and fall out of the sky or crash into the platform. There are about 6,000 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
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