Tsunami killed thousands of seabirds

Honolulu: Thousands of birds were killed when a tsunami generated by a strong earthquake last week off the coast of Japan flooded with Midway, a remote north-west of the main atoll of the Hawaiian Islands, federal officials said Tuesday wildlife.
At least, thousands of adults and adolescents Laysan albatrosses were killed, along with thousands of chickens, "said Barry W. Stieglitz, project leader and Hawaii Pacific National Wildlife Refuges.
Many drowned or were buried under debris in the form of waves up to 5 feet turned low-lying atolls, about four hours after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake on Friday.
White and black feathered Laysan albatross is not in danger of extinction. About 1 million birds live in the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge about 1300 km north-west of Honolulu, making it the largest colony of Laysan albatrosses in the world.
But Stiglitz said the deaths could reach a significant share of Laysan albatross chicks hatched during the current season.
"We can see only a slight decrease in breeding birds in the next year, next year and the year after that, he said." There will be a gap in the breeding population, when these birds, which rose this year, will have matured and began to breed in the first time. "
Waves hit each of the three islands inside the atoll.
Spit Island, approximately 15 acres, was completely overrun. The tsunami swept 60 percent of the eastern island, an island about 370 acres. Waves also covers 20 percent of the sand island, the largest of the three almost 1200 acres.
Biologists are less sure how much ground-nesting petrels Bonin, may be dead, because these birds live in underground burrows, and it would be buried in areas covered by the waves. Stiglitz estimated the death toll will reach thousands.
Since the submission of Bonin petrels at night, however, Stiglitz said that he hoped many of the nursery, when the tsunami until dawn.
Stiglitz said that many wildlife populations rebound from natural disasters such as this. But he said that a tsunami is not useful for species facing threats such as climate change, habitat loss and invasive species.
"When you start the installation of natural disasters on top of invasive species invasions and all these other things, it makes people far less stable and more susceptible to extinction," he said. "This is a rather unfortunate time, in our eyes. Not that it ever a good time for this, but there are better times than the worse of times. And in this era, this is the worst time."