This could have been avoided if you would have just moved into a 15 minute city, you know
Study warns climate change could force flamingos from their natural homes
Rising water levels threaten to flush colorful flamingos from their homes, a new study has suggested.
Huge flocks or “flamboyances” of flamingos around East Africa’s lakes have been called one of the world’s most spectacular sights, being displayed in the film “Out of Africa and David Attenborough’s A Perfect Planet.”
Now, research from King’s College London suggests that this spectacular sight could be a thing of the past, as the lesser flamingo is in danger of being flushed out of its historic feeding grounds.
For the first time satellite data has been used to study all the key flamingo-feeding lakes in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania over two decades—which identified how rising water levels are reducing the birds’ main food source.
The region was once home to more than three-quarters of the global population of lesser flamingos, but their numbers are declining.
The scientists do understand that the flamingos have been moving with the lakes, and the water levels of the lakes will have gone up and down throughout the Holocene, right? And that the whole area of those three nations are part of a massive fault line, including one which is splitting off from Western Africa, right? And those fault lines have created so many of the lakes, right? Oh, sorry, it’s because people drive fossil fueled vehicles.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, discovered that rising water levels in soda lakes are diluting their normally salty and alkaline nature, leading to a decline in flamingo’s main food source of phytoplankton.
This change was notably seen at the important tourist lake Nakuru, which has historically supported over one million birds at a time.
The lake increased in surface area by 91 percent from 2009 to 2022 whilst its mean chlorophyll-a concentrations halved.
A goodly chunk of African flamingos live in the area associated with the Great Rift Valley, which grows bigger each year. Not much, plate tectonics are slow. Many of the main lakes are only about 10,000 years old, created as the sea levels rose as the last glacial age was really ending, along with rift. Funny how none of the articles mention any of this.
Oh, and the article itself really doesn’t mention climatic changes, man-caused or natural. It’s like they had to run the cult headline. The flamingos will just move, like life on Earth has always done.
Read: Your Fault: Flamingos Might Have To Move Due To ‘Climate Change’ »