The origins of a seabird epidemic

Thanks to your support, this project won a challenge grant!

Key takeaways

• With enough individual backers, a research project supported by Wild Animal Initiative has the opportunity to win extra funding through a challenge grant offered by Experiment.com.
• The proposed project would monitor the movements of adult magnificent frigatebirds (Fregata magnificens) to determine the relationship between mercury poisoning, parental behavior, and juvenile mortality from a common disease.
• This research would advance our understanding of key components of wild animal welfare: disease, juvenile mortality, and interactions between human and natural threats to welfare.
• By engaging new audiences and demonstrating public interest, crowdfunding could accelerate the growth of an academic field dedicated to wild animal welfare.

June 11, 2021

To improve the lives of wild animals, we have to understand them first. By supporting wild animal welfare research, Wild Animal Initiative aims both to answer questions about welfare and to build the infrastructure for answering more questions in the future. We’re supporting a study on an epidemic killing magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens) chicks because we think it has the potential to serve these goals simultaneously.

The project also presents an unusual opportunity for supporters to support research directly, thanks to the scientific crowdfunding site Experiment.com. Until June 21, 2021, every donation to the project — no matter how small — increases the researchers’ chance of winning an extra $1,250 for research materials.

Identifying the causes of a seabird pandemic

Grand Connétable is just a small rocky island off the coast of French Guiana, but it has been something of a haven for magnificent frigatebirds: their only breeding site in a 1,500-km (930-mile) stretch of coast. Now, a novel herpesvirus kills as many as nine out of every ten chicks on the island each year.

Like many wild animals, frigatebirds typically suffer from high juvenile mortality rates. Even in stable populations in relatively high-quality habitat, about half the chicks die young from disease, starvation, exposure, or other causes. But on Grand Connétable, something is exacerbating the usual threats.

Dr. Manrico Sebastiano, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, thinks he knows why. Mercury used in onshore gold mining runs into the ocean, accumulating in the bodies of fish and the frigatebirds that eat those fish. Because mercury can interfere with prolactin, a hormone that regulates parenting behavior, Dr. Sebastiano and his team suspect the pollution is causing more frigatebirds to neglect or abandon their chicks. The more malnourished and unprotected chicks there are in a colony, the easier it is for a virus to infect, mutate, and spread.

But as long as this is only a hypothesis, we can’t be sure how to respond to the epidemic. Dr. Sebastiano’s team wants to test their hypothesis by measuring the mercury levels in the frigatebirds of Grand Connétable and outfitting them with GPS trackers. That will allow them to see whether adults with higher mercury loads are more likely to neglect or abandon their chicks. It will also reveal how often these birds overlap with other nesting colonies, thus how likely the virus is to spread.

The researchers have already funded a basic version of their project, in part through a grant from Wild Animal Initiative. But given the chaos and idiosyncrasies of wild systems, a study’s sample size can make or break whether it can pick the signal out from the noise. So Sebastiano and his team are turning to grassroots science supporters to cover the costs of buying more GPS trackers and checking more colonies for signs of the virus’s spread.

Understanding common threats to wild animal welfare

So far, this virus is primarily affecting a single population of a single bird species. But because this case combines several common threats to wild animal welfare, understanding it could advance efforts to help animals worldwide.

Like the frigatebirds of Grand Connétable, wild animals everywhere are vulnerable to disease. Even when diseases don’t cause death, they can still cause prolonged or intense suffering. Yet there are several reasons disease may be a relatively tractable problem to solve. The medical and veterinary sciences provide a strong foundation for further research specific to wildlife. In fact, there are already many efforts underway to control wildlife diseases, in large part because of the risks they pose to the health of humans and livestock. While there is tremendous variation across wildlife diseases, Dr. Sebastiano’s study is poised to produce relatively generalizable results, because it focuses on the environmental factors that contribute to poor health, rather than the specific etiology of the frigatebird herpesvirus.

The deaths of juveniles are especially important to understanding wild animal welfare, because most animals die young. For example, in an analysis of published demographic models of 88 animal species, we found that the average lifespan was only 16% of the species’ maximum lifespan. Despite the fact that so many wild animals die as juveniles, the earliest stages of life are often the least-studied. Grand Connétable is a promising place to fill that gap. Behind the extraordinarily high juvenile mortality rate for frigatebirds is a confluence of ordinary threats to the welfare of many species: parental neglect, malnourishment, and infection. 

If Dr. Sebastiano is right, these natural causes of death are exacerbated by human activity. Although the proposed study focuses on the apparent harms of gold mining, it’s interesting to note that these frigatebirds have also benefited from human activity. Bycatch discarded by shrimp trawlers provided frigatebirds with an abundant and accessible food source until the industry declined in the region (Martinet & Blanchard 2009). Again, Grand Connétable serves as a microcosm for the complex forces shaping the welfare of animals worldwide.

Supporting academic field-building

Wild Animal Initiative has already funded part of the proposed study, together with the National Museum of Natural History of Paris and another European grantor. Now, we’re asking wildlife advocates to contribute the remainder.

Grassroots donors can support wild animal welfare science in a way institutional grantors can’t. When many people chip in for a project, it can signal broader public support for that line of research. We suspect that this could, in turn, attract more researchers and institutional grantors to similar projects. If that effect exists, we predict it will be particularly strong for wild animal welfare: a field of research that is surprisingly underexplored relative to the general public’s concern for the suffering of wildlife.

Crowdfunding also offers the general public an exceptionally concrete way to contribute to the advancement of science. This might engage more supporters than abstract appeals to support the field as a whole.

If both the bottom-up and the top-down benefits of crowdfunding are strong enough, they have the potential to power a virtuous cycle of field growth: grassroots support attracts more institutional support, which then attracts more grassroots support.

In addition to the scientific merits of the frigatebird study, we are eager to test the viability of crowdfunding as an approach to field-building. One campaign won’t be enough to know for sure, but the success of this pilot will facilitate further investigation. If you share our interest in supporting the growth of a self-sustaining academic field dedicated to improving the lives of wild animals, we encourage you to join this effort to protect frigatebird chicks.