J. Exp. Biol. 212, 2483–2490 (2009)

Seabirds wintering off the shores of Newfoundland and Greenland often fall victim to 'winter wrecks', vast die-offs that can cast corpses ashore by the thousand. With the harsh North Atlantic winter, it is difficult to study the mechanisms of these wrecks directly. So Jérôme Fort of the CNRS in Montpellier, France, and his colleagues used a program called Niche Mapper to predict the energy and food requirements of two species from 1 September to 1 March.

They integrated microclimate data with the physiological and behavioural qualities of Brünnich's guillemots (Uria lomvia) and little auks (Alle alle). The model predicted a sharp increase in energy requirements for both species between November and December that was influenced most by falling air temperatures. Although a preliminary estimate, this energetic bottleneck fits well with the observed timing of winter wrecks in the northwest Atlantic.