Along the Gulf Coast, where industry and ecology have long shared uneasy ground, the deaths of more than 160 black skimmer chicks in 2022 and 2023 have revealed something science had never before encountered: a parasite entirely unknown to the record. Researchers from Texas A&M and the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory identified two new forms of Eimeria living in the kidneys and intestines of the birds, marking the first such infection documented in the species. The discovery is less a singular alarm than a window into a deeper convergence — of habitat transformation, environmental contamination, a