A huge number of bird carcasses were found on Alaskan Coasts, leading to the federal government to conduct an investigation.

According to the Washington Post, thousand of dead common murres, a bird native to Alaska, have been found off the state's sea coasts.

With the death toll reaching an alarming rate, the National Wildlife Health Center finally issued a bulletin regarding the the rising incident of common murres deaths over the past 11 months. Apart from that, the Alaskan sea bird deaths are also drawing the attention of other federal and state agencies.

As noted by Julie Lenoch, deputy director of the wildlife center, she and her team are looking for alleged large-scale events that may have poisoned the birds. The agency is also investigating whether the cause of death can also affect other species of animals.

The common murre is noted to be North America's most abundant sea bird species, which can be usually found residing all throughout the Artic. Dead bodies of these birds ranged from dozens to thousands since March and have been found on beaches of Alaska and east of Aleutian Islands.

But apart from the common murre, other sea bird species such as the thick-billed murres, black-legged kittwakes, horned and tufted puffins, murrelets, glaucous-winged gulls and short-tailed shearwaters were also found dead on the coasts.

As of current press time, no evidence of poisoning has been found, which led to researchers to theorize that the sea birds are dying of starvation.

According to a similar report by KUAC,org, the ocean's unusually warm waters may have caused the fishes, which are the usual food of sea birds, to disappear, leading to the common murre to die of starvation.

Experts explained that warm waters have sharply decreased the number of fishes that these birds eat in the sea, due to the fact that there's less "upwelling" and circulation on warm waters, resulting into planktons going up from the lower depths of the ocean for the fish to feed on.

Robb Kaler, a migratory bird expert said that this has never happened before and added that, "At many colonies in the western Gulf of Alaska, murres completely failed reproductively, and that's really unusual."

Kaler noted that they have also never seen a complete abandonment of a bird colony, which they attributed to lack of food source.

The researchers said that the murres have been going back and forth searching for a viable food source, and have died simply to a combination of hunger and exhaustion.