Satellite tracking of wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) in the South Atlantic

Abstract

The movements of two wandering albatrosses, one of each sex, breeding at South Georgia, were tracked using satellite telemetry, particularly to assess whether such birds could be at risk from longline fishing operations in the subtropics. Full details of the performance (number and quality of uplinks) of the Toyocom transmitters are provided, together with data on flight speeds and night and daytime travel by the albatrosses.The female, tracked for seventeen days-covering three foraging trips totalling 13951 km -had a much more northerly distribution than the male, which made two trips to sea during the same period and travelled aminimum distanceof 9280km. On one trip the female frequented the area off Brazil known to beused for longlinefisheries. The distributional differences between the sexes support earlier suggestions, based on at-sea observations, that the observed high mortality rates of South Georgian females could be due to a greater likelihood of incidental mortality in longline fishing. These results also show that the presence of females off Brazil can include birds still rearing chicks, rather than simply representing post-breeding dispersal.

Foraging niches of three Diomedea albatrosses

“…The Antipodean (wandering) albatross and northern royal albatross were PTT tagged in New Zealand (Table 1) (Britten et al 1999). For wandering albatrosses from Bird Island, South Georgia (Prince et al 1992(Prince et al , 1998, PTTs were glued to the feathers, and these were generally removed after a single foraging trip. They transmitted on a continuous duty cycle.…”

“…Satellite tracking and archival tags have shown that albatrosses and other Procellariiformes travel great distances to forage when breeding (Prince et al 1992, Weimerskirch et al 1993, Weimerskirch & Robertson 1994, Nicholls et al 1994, Walker et al 1995, Freeman et al 1997, Anderson et al 1998, Brothers et al 1998, Klomp & Schultz 1999, Berrow et al 2000, González-Solís et al 2000a,b, Stahl & Sagar 2000, Croxall & Wood. 2001.…”

Seasonal sexual segregation in twoThalassarchealbatross species: competitive exclusion, reproductive role specialization or foraging niche divergence?

“…Research on wandering albatrosses, Diomedea exulans, provided a novel example of sexual segregation in the marine environment. Differences in foraging habitat between males and females were first proposed on the basis of latitudinal variation in at-sea distributions of birds sexed by plumage (Weimerskirch & Jouventin 1987), and confirmed by the pioneering use of satellite-telemetry in the early 1990s (Prince et al 1992;Weimerskirch et al 1993).…”

Environmental drivers of variability in the movement ecology of turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) in North and South America

“…Satellite tracking coupled with the emerging discipline of movement ecology offers a new working paradigm for understanding the internal and external factors that affect the movements of birds and, in turn, their behavioural ecology and conservation biology [4]. Three decades of studies involving satellite tracking have served avian ecologists well in helping to determine the general routes and destinations of free-ranging migratory birds and describing previously unknown movements and species distributions, often with important conservation implications [5][6][7][8].…”