California gulls that nest at the eastern Sierra’s Mono Lake suffered a catastrophic breeding failure last year, according to the latest installment in a four-decade-long series of reports tracking the birds’ health. Biologists with Point Blue Conservation Science said in their study of the gulls’ 2024 breeding season that although 20,000 breeding birds built roughly 10,000 nests at the lake, just 324 chicks survived. … The report attributed the low survival rate to the scarcity of the brine shrimp essential to the breeding gulls’ diet. That scarcity, in turn, is the product of an unusual stratification of lake waters due to its artificially low levels. … The gulls’ reproductive crash is prompting calls for state water regulators to reconsider measures ordered more than three decades ago to restore Mono Lake’s degraded ecosystems.