Are seabirds finding enough food to eat?
The Seabird Youth Network is collaborating with Dr. Sasha Kitaysky at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, this coming summer, collecting blood samples from Least Auklets to examine levels of nutritional stress in auklets breeding on St. Paul and St. George.
The nutritional stress of seabirds can be assessed by measuring circulating levels of the steroid hormone corticosterone (CORT).
Sasha’s graduate students, Alexis Will and Rebecca Young, recently skyped with students at St. Paul. They explained how CORT can be used as an indicator of nutritional stress in seabirds, and their presentation included details of collecting blood in the field, and a short video on processing the samples back in the lab.
https://sites.google.com/a/alaska.edu/kitayskylab/seabirds-for-syn