LSU scientist helping unravel Hitchcock mystery

USA Today reports LSU ocean environmentalist Sibel Bargu led a team of scientists that may have finally solved a longstanding mystery related to the work of film legend Alfred Hitchcock: What triggered the crazed bird flocks that helped inspire his 1963 thriller The Birds? “I am pretty convinced that the birds were poisoned,” Bargu is quoted in an article you can read in its entirety here. Dying and disoriented seabirds rammed themselves into homes across California’s Monterey Bay in the summer of 1961, sparking a mystery about the cause among marine biologists. The avian incidents sparked local visitor Hitchcock’s interest, along with a story about spooky bird behavior by British writer Daphne du Maurier. Looking at the stomach contents of turtles and seabirds gathered in 1961 Monterey Bay ship surveys, Bargu and colleagues have now found toxin-making algae were present in 79% of the plankton that the creatures ate. In particular, the team reports in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience that the leading toxin inside the plankton was a nerve-damaging acid, which causes confusion, seizures and death in birds. A similar algae bloom contaminated mussels that caused the death of four people in Canada’s Prince Edward Island in 1987. Most likely, the 1961 seabirds ate anchovies and squid loaded with the brain-damaging acid. “This is the most compelling evidence so far that there’s a direct link,” says University of Southern California plankton expert Raphael Kudela, who was not part of the study team.