Aidan is a final year PhD candidate based at King's College London and the Natural History Museum London, funded by the London NERC DTP.
Huge pink flocks of millions of flamingos — flamboyances of flamingos — are one of nature's great spectacles. But colleagues and I have uncovered worrying trends in the salty and highly-alkaline"soda lakes" of east Africa where most of these birds live.
However, rising water levels at many of the feeding lakes are decimating the cyanobacteria the birds have evolved to eat. In research now published in the journal Current Biology, my colleagues and I found that only half of the lakes that provided high-quality feeding habitat in 2000 were still suitable feeding lakes in 2022.
But these lakes are especially sensitive to change because they often have no outflowing rivers. And as their waters rise they are diluted, reducing their salinity and alkalinity and limiting the growth of the cyanobacteria the flamingos depend on. Water levels have risen the most in recent years in Kenya and Tanzania, particularly at historically important flamingo lakes Bogoria and Nakuru, which supported more than 1 million birds in the recent past.
Rising water levels are likely caused by a combination of increased rainfall in recent decades and deforestation which causes the rainfall to run off directly into the lakes. Rainfall is predicted to increase in east Africa with climate change, driving further lake level rises in the future. RELATED STORIES—Stunning footage captures tiny bird's fight for survival in massive Saharan sandstorm—Underwater robot in Siberia's Lake Baikal reveals hidden mud volcanoes — and an active fault
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