At this symposium, it was left to a biologist with no pretentions in either physics or mathematics to demonstrate the need for seabird ornithologists to understand basic environmental processes well beyond their usual range of interests. I did so with a series of slides taken from this "other" literature, and I had intended to include in the published version of this paper an extensive bibliography, subdivided into category groupings, so that seabird ornithologists could make their own selection of the points in the spectrum at which they most needed information.
Unfortunately, limitations upon space in this volume, daily additions to the exploding literature, and my own inability to keep up with understanding this have forced me to omit any references and not to attempt to expound detailed specific physical mechanisms.
Thus unencumbered here, I shall briefly outline instead what I perceive to be some of the significance for seabird ornithology and conservation of the rapidly expanding understanding of the oceans, the air-sea interface, atmospheric dynamics, and influences upon the world's climate of extraterrestrial events.
There is no need to dwell on the well-known events that could be mentioned under this heading. Seabird ornithologists are familiar with the fact that the atmosphere is the medium of seabirds both when searching the ocean for feeding areas and when on migration, and also a violent enemy, as when particular storms cause occasional "wrecks" of seabirds inland from coastlines. As a refinement of the former, Manikowski of Poland suggests that seabirds respond to the passage of weather systems, so that their distribution over the open ocean may be constantly changing. Whereas some species may attempt to avoid the stormy conditions of low-pressure areas (cyclonic conditions), others more highly specialized for exploiting the aerodynamic properties of wind over a moving water surface may possibly, instead, try to avoid large high-pressure regions (anticyclonic conditions with little or no wind). My student, Juan Guzman, is attempting to determine whether this may be so; if it is, it might be possible, for example, to predict some things about the distribution patterns and population structure of southern hemisphere shearwaters while they are visiting the oceans of the northern hemisphere during the nonbreeding season.