The Peculiarities of the Helminth Fauna of Herring Gulls of the Synanthropic Murmansk Population

摘要

The feeding resources of seabirds have been considerably damaged in the Barents Sea region in the second half of the 20th century, which mainly resulted from large-scale commercial fishery. A pronounced tendency towards synanthropy of some seabird species, mainly the herring gull (Lams argentatus), is one of the most important and obvious consequences of this process. Herring gulls especially intensely spread to anthropogenic landscapes of the Kola Peninsula in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the birds began to use food waste cans, municipal garbage dumps, and wastes from fur farms as feeding stations [1-3]. Until the late 1990s, gulls only scavenged for food in urban areas; then, they began nesting and raising their nestlings on the roofs of town buildings, including those within the city limits of Murmansk [4]. The reproduction efficiency was very high there, as evidenced by large sizes of the clutches and a low mortality of the nestlings [4, 5]. Such considerable changes in the bird ecologyand behavior could not but affect the composition of their helminth fauna. However, there have been few, if any, reliable data on the parasites of the seabirds that have moved from their traditional habitats to urban landscapes.