In the Falkland Islands, hundreds of thousands of penguins were harvested for their oil each individual 12 months. Discards normally gain surface feeders, these as gannets and petrels, to the detriment of pursuit divers like penguins and guillemots, which can get entangled in the nets. This can have other impacts for instance, the unfold of the northern fulmar by the United Kingdom is attributed in part to the availability of discards. These discards compose 30% of the foodstuff of seabirds in the North Sea, for illustration, and compose up to 70% of the complete food of some seabird populations. Some seabird species have benefited from fisheries, specifically from discarded fish and offal. Seabirds have been hunted for meals by coastal peoples during heritage-1 of the earliest cases recognized is in southern Chile, the place archaeological excavations in middens has demonstrated hunting of albatrosses, cormorants and shearwaters from 5000 BP. The looking of seabirds and the accumulating of seabird eggs have contributed to the declines of a lot of species, and the extinction of various, together with the great auk and the spectacled cormorant. Other human factors have led to declines and even extinctions in seabird populations and species. Indirectly, fisheries have also benefited from guano from colonies of seabirds acting as fertilizer for the encompassing seas.

Other species, these as some of the storm petrels, diving petrels and cormorants, never ever disperse at all, being around their breeding colonies year round. The disturbance of breeding colonies by individuals is generally a dilemma as properly-website visitors, even properly-indicating vacationers, myfreewebcams can flush brooding older people off a colony, leaving chicks and eggs vulnerable to predators. Seabirds, breeding predominantly on little isolated islands, are vulnerable to predators mainly because they have misplaced several behaviours associated with defence from predators.