Like sunburned gourmands on the Travel Channel, the Hawaiian petrel is known for traveling far and wide in search of delectable eats.

And now, just like those celebrity samplers, the birds are being leveraged to provide useful information about what’s available to eat out there.

In a study reported in the March 28 edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Michigan State University examined evidence preserved in Hawaiian petrel bones and found that the diet of the now-endangered seabird likely shifted within the last 100 years, possibly due to industrial fishing practices.

As the researchers note, petrels fly thousands of miles between the equator and areas near the Aleutian Islands when they aren’t breeding in Hawaii.

In a news release about the study, paleontologist Helen James, curator-­in-charge of the museum’s bird collection, likened the birds to drones that sample the food web across the North Pacific. Their remains provide a record of their diet.

James and MSU biogeochemist Peggy Ostrom used petrel bones collected from breeding sites on Maui and Hawaii island and fossils from birds that existed in the area prior to human influence to compare how the petrel’s feeding habits have changed since as a result of industrial fishing and other human activities.

Based on analysis of nitrogen isotopes in the bones to determine how many “steps” there are in the birds’ food chain, the researchers found that modern petrels had a shorter food chain, either because of changes in food resources or a change in the nitrogen source at the low end of the food chain.

Through collaborative testing with Yoshito Chikaraishi, formerly of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science &Technology, the scientists were able to eliminate changes in nitrogen processing as a cause, bolstering the case for human influence.

“The bird is acting like a sentinel for what’s happening in the ocean,” Ostrom said in the release. “Trophic (feeding) structure is changing. And since this is a top predator that flies across the Pacific Ocean, that means something at a pretty broad scale has occurred.”