HI:
See below! Has anyone seen pink gulls around here?
One of the other Chatters today informed me that the color additive added
to
farmed shrimp (such as those in Ecuador), which also is known to pigment
Elegant Terns, is astaxanthin. [see: "Carotenoids produce flush in the
Elegant Tern plumage" (Hudon and Brush, 1990, Condor 92:798-801]. And, a
Seattle Post-Intelligencer article recently indicated that Ringed-bills
in
the Northwest are turning up pink; canthaxanthin and astaxanthin are used
to color farmed salmon in that area. This extremely interesting since it
implicates food coloring (at least in part) as causing the outbreak of
"pink-gull".

P.S. I also learned that >50% of the FrGu's appearing at Bear River NWR,
UT
are brightly pink this year too.


Ian Paulsen
Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
ipaulsen at krl.org
A.K.A.: "Birdbooker"
"Rallidae all the way"