What's Killing Roseate Terns? by RoseWrites T-Shirt

After researching the Zika virus extensively and publishing "Wolbachia-Infected Mosquitoes Might Reduce Dengue, Enhance Zika, and Cause a Million Souls to Become Sterile" on InfoBarrel (under my pen name, RoseWrites), I found out about our crashing roseate tern population in Canada. Andrew Boyne, head of conservation planning for the Canadian Wildlife Service, thought the issue may be what is happening during the seven or eight months the birds are not in Canada and either migrating along the Eastern Seaboard or wintering in Brazil. And I know roseate terns have been protected for about 15 years. My immediate thought was that Wolbachia-infected Aedes mosquito releases (carried out in Brazil) are at the root of this. Roseate terns eat almost exclusively small fish, primarily the American sand lance. Larval American sand lance (Ammodytes americanus) eat phytoplankton and then copepods, at increasingly older developmental stages. Copepods eat small animals up to twice their own size. And when mosquito larvae are numerous, copepods eat only a small part of each larva, giving each copepod the capacity to kill 30 to 40 larvae per day, far more than they actually eat. By selling this T-shirt, I hope special interest groups, birders, and wildlife lovers can help scientists discover why roseate tern numbers are declining so rapidly and find a way to help them recover. P.S. I will donate 50 percent of my royalties from every sale of this T-shirt in support of Zika research and/or roseate tern conservation efforts. Front photo: A common tern and chicks by National Marine Sanctuaries on flickr. Photo credit: USFWS [Public Domain] Back image: World map by Christopher Schnese on flickr (CC-by-2.0) Colours and Text by me, RoseWrites. Created December 3rd, 2016.