Abstract

Thousands of Razorbill seabirds in late 2012 invaded Florida offshore waters for the first time ever. This paper verifies the uniqueness of this event, and suggests a possible source location (the northern Gulf of Maine GOM) for many of these errant birds. It hypothesizes a multi-step mechanism which could have enabled this invasion, including the extreme tidal mixing in the Bay of Fundy BOF acting as an unusually effective gas-liquid direct contact heat-exchanger, and finds evidence in the GOM for this multi-step hypothesis. Much of this evidence came from the RARGOM 2013 conference, with some new pieces of evidence having been discovered in 2014. Some economic impacts on the coupled human ecosystem are estimated.  Further testing of this hypothesis and continued collaboration between multiple disciplines is recommended going forward, including a shared central directory of key information, starting with the GOM.