Studies have shown that fishery activities out at sea strongly impact the ecology of seabirds. The large-scale spreading from fisheries and the presence of fisherman's boats discarding fish are directly influencing the patterns and seabirds through the seascape. A team of experts run by Frederic Bartumeus have been tracing the patterns of two Mediterranean seabirds in response to the activities of local fisheries and the fish that people toss away. Bartumeus explains that human activities in the natural environment can ultimately cause change in the patterns of foraging animals by simply altering the predictability and availability of their food resources. In fact, this study may be an important insight for the study of invasive species and a statistical framework for the movement patterns across many ecological scales, which can be applied to other species and certain circumstances.
The researchers found that when the fisheries don't operate, seabirds intertwine local traveling with very far and long distance traveling. Although these movement patterns are generally normal, considering it allows for effective explorations of food, the contrast of the seabirds ecological patterns when the fisheries are operating are extremely different. When the fisherman are discarding the fish, the seabirds tend to navigate local searches around the boats known as an "attracting force". The confined movement of these seabirds will eventually decelerate the spreading of these scavenging seabirds overtime. The overall connection between human local resource utilization and global movement patterns of organisms are extremely prominent.
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