Albatrosses

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Albatrosses
Black-browed albatross (Thalassarche melanophris)

Black- browed albatross ( Thalassarche melanophris )

Systematics
Trunk : Chordates (chordata)
Sub-stem : Vertebrates (vertebrata)
Class : Birds (aves)
Order : Tubular noses (Procellariiformes)
Family : Albatrosses
Scientific name
Diomedeidae
GR Gray , 1840

The albatrosses (Diomedeidae) are a family of sea ​​birds from the order of the tubular noses (Procellariiformes). Of the 21 species, 17 are found in the southern oceans, three in the North Pacific and one in the tropics.

features

The albatrosses are a group of large to very large sea birds with very long and narrow wings . Albatrosses can reach wingspans of over 3.5 meters, surpassing any other living bird species. Even the smallest members of the family still have spans of two meters. Weighing up to 12 kilograms, albatrosses are among the heaviest birds capable of flying.

The beak is large, strong and pointed. It is often bright yellow or pink in color. Albatrosses have two small tubes on their beak through which the sea salt can be excreted. The legs are short and strong and enable a waddling but safe gait. The toes are webbed . Albatrosses are good swimmers who can stay on the water even in high waves.

distribution and habitat

Distribution of the albatross

The majority of the species live over the oceans of the southern hemisphere. There they occur mainly on various islands such as Falkland , Macquarie Island , Crozet Islands , Prince Edward Islands and South Georgia ; in addition, they form isolated colonies in the Antarctic .

Climatically, the focus is on polar and subpolar latitudes, less often in temperate zones, and with the Galapagos albatross only one species lives in the tropics. Three other species live, geographically clearly separated from the aforementioned, in the subtropical, temperate and sub-polar regions of the North Pacific .

In the North Atlantic and its adjacent seas, there is no albatrosses usually; they are also absent in the tropics , apart from the vicinity of the Galápagos Islands . While the Southern Ocean is home to a large number of albatross species, they are completely absent in the Arctic Ocean .

Storms, however, mean that albatrosses also hit the northern hemisphere. Since they cannot fly without wind, they can then no longer cross the equatorial calms and so often remain in the "wrong" hemisphere for several years. For example, a black-browed albatross was seen annually in the Shetland Islands from 1972 to 1987 . A black-browed albatross has also been sighted regularly on Heligoland since 2014.

Albatrosses usually avoid being near the coast and only go to dry land to breed. You can undertake hikes over enormous distances by flying, often the whole earth is circled. Small islands with grassy slopes are mostly used as breeding grounds. Rocky cliffs, on the other hand, offer unsuitable conditions for albatrosses because of the difficulties in taking off and landing.

According to a NABU report from 2020, more than 300,000 seabirds (including around 100,000 albatrosses) die every year from deep-sea fishing, and in particular from longlines .

Way of life

To fly

Although they are quickly exhausted by the movements of their huge wings, albatrosses can travel very long distances. To do this, they use the technology of dynamic gliding . If the wind speed falls below 12 km / h, albatrosses can no longer take off and must remain on land or on the water. On the other hand, they can still maneuver even in storms.

Albatrosses are known for being very good fliers, but having great difficulty taking off and landing. The large animal only takes off after a long take-off run, and during the long glide landing the birds can overturn due to excessive speed, break wings or legs. The latter usually leads to death. Breeding colonies provide shared runways and no nests are built along them. Even so, landing in the countryside is always a dangerous undertaking and occasionally serious accidents can occur. Albatrosses have less difficulty taking off and landing on the water.

nutrition

The main food of the albatross is squid . These often migrate from the deep sea to near-surface water at night, so that albatrosses come together to feed above the swarms. Small fish are also an important part of the diet, mostly only up to the size of a sardine . Other food sources are crustaceans and, rarely, jellyfish and carrion .

Albatrosses are good fliers, but they cannot fly difficult maneuvers near the surface. As a result, only the smallest species can catch prey on the surface. Most albatrosses perch on the water and eat while swimming.

Albatrosses often follow ships in order to use their updrafts and to be able to stay in the air and travel with them without any effort. Fishing boats are being prosecuted for waste being thrown overboard. Whalers are popular to feast on the unused parts of the killed whales . Furthermore, albatrosses sometimes act as kleptoparasites ; for example, Galapagos albatrosses regularly hunt gannets for their prey. The black-browed albatross sometimes follows killer whales to eat what remains of their prey.

Reproduction

Brooding laysanal bat

Albatrosses have an extraordinarily long reproductive cycle. A full year passes from nest building to the independence of the young in the larger species, so that they can only breed every two years. Only a few species breed annually.

In contrast to most other tube noses, albatrosses have a complex courtship ritual . This includes the synchronous raising of the heads, the spreading of the wings, rubbing the flanks with the beaks and numerous calls. Albatrosses are monogamous and meet the previous partner with each brood. The male reaches the breeding site a few days before the female and defends it against competitors. When the partners meet, there are some ritualized greeting gestures that are less complex. Another courtship only takes place if one of the partners has died and does not return to the nesting site.

Albatrosses nest in colonies that can range from a few hundred to a few thousand nests. The largest colonies are Laysan albatrosses and black- browed albatrosses, where over 100,000 pairs can breed together. However, even in the largest colonies, the nests are a few meters apart, so that little interaction occurs between the breeding pairs.

Most albatrosses build large nests out of grass, moss, and mud. The North Pacific species, on the other hand, only dig a shallow nest pit, and the Galapagos albatross doesn't build a nest at all. The single egg weighs 205 to 487 grams and is incubated by both partners for an average of ten to eleven weeks. A bird incubates for several days without ingesting food before its partner takes over. Only when the hatched young bird is three to five weeks old do both partners leave it for several hours or days. The young are fed pre-digested food and an oily substance that is produced in the stomach and excreted through the tubes on the beak.

Age

Albatrosses are very long-lived birds. The large species breed for the first time between the ages of ten and eleven. The oldest albatross with at least 67 years of age and thus also the oldest wild bird (as of January 2018) is a Laysanalbatross named " Wisdom ", which was ringed as a breeding adult bird in 1956 and was still successfully breeding in 2016 and again laid an egg in January 2018 . However, there is a high mortality rate in young birds. 70 percent of young wandering albatrosses do not survive their first year of life.

Tribal history

Already in the early Oligocene the albatross Tydea septentrionalis has been identified, which lived in the area of ​​the North Sea, where albatrosses no longer occur today. There were also albatross-like birds in the same region. These seabirds, which belong to the genera Rupelornis and Diomedeoides , which have long since become extinct , are included in a separate family Diomedeoididae according to the newer classifications and were apparently not yet real albatrosses.

Representatives of the real albatross have been increasingly documented since the Miocene . These include the extinct albatross genus Plotornis and representatives of the recent genera Diomedea and Thalassarche . The separation of the northern albatross from the southern species was already completed in the Miocene, and the molecular clock also suggests that all four recent genera existed at the end of the Miocene. Diomedea and Phoebastria separated around 23, Thalassarche and Phoebetria around 28 million years ago.

Today there are no albatrosses in the North Atlantic . There they were distributed in at least five species in the Pliocene , four of which belonged to the genus Phoebastria , and the fifth was the extinct Diomedea anglica . The reason for the extinction in the North Atlantic is unknown, but could be related to climatic fluctuations during the Pleistocene .

Systematics

External system

Albatrosses belong to the order of the tubular noses . Traditionally, they are classified at the base of this taxon. However, according to more recent findings, this is not the case. Albatrosse are therefore the sister group of a common taxon from storm birds and diving storm birds , and all together in turn form the Schwestertaxon the Hydrobatinae, traditionally considered subfamily of petrels was.

Internal system

Galapagos albatross ( Phoebastria irrorata )

Traditionally, the albatrosses were divided into two genera with 14  species . These were Diomedea and Phoebetria . When it became clear that Diomedea would be paraphyletic in the original combination , the genera Phoebastria and Thalassarche were divided, so that there are now four genera, all of which are almost certainly monophyletic .

The number of species has recently increased dramatically. In 1998, the zoologists Robertson and Nunn described 24 species instead of the 14 species that had been common up until then. The increase in the number of species is, however, only due to the elevation of taxa previously regarded as subspecies to the species status, not to the discovery of new species. The number of 21 species shown in the following list follows Brooke 2004 (see literature).

The genera Diomedea and Phoebastria are sister taxa , as are the genera Thalassarche and Phoebetria . The relationships are shown in the following cladogram:

  Diomedeidae   
  "Big Albatrosses"   

 Diomedea


   

 Phoebastria



  "Little Albatrosses"   

 Thalassarche


   

 Phoebetria




Humans and albatrosses

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Albatroz - woodcut in the magazine O Panorama (1837)

The word "Albatros" came into German via the English seafaring language. It represents a presumably under the influence of lat . albus “white” is a modification of the Spanish and Portuguese alcatraz , which today denotes the booby , but originally large black seabirds in general and the pelican in particular. The Spanish word, in turn, is derived from the Arabic al-qādūs "shovel of a waterwheel", which the Moors used to refer to the pelican, referring to its throat pouch .

Seafarers had a special relationship with albatrosses. On the one hand, some animals were hunted at the latest from the 18th century to enrich the on-board catering for their meat. On the other hand, albatrosses were thought to be the souls of dead sailors. Perhaps this was the origin of the seaman's belief that it would be bad luck to kill an albatross (immortalized by Coleridge , see below); According to the Chilean Cape Hornier Association, there was even a custom among seafarers to catch albatrosses in flight from the ship, but to release them again. The organization of the Cape Horniers (sailors who had circled Cape Horn on freighters ), founded in the 20th century, even used an albatross head with a fishing hook as a logo, and anyone who had circumnavigated the Cape as captain of a freight sailor received the honorary title of Albatross .

At the end of the 19th century, albatrosses served as spring suppliers for clothing linings and pillow fillings. Several colonies comprising hundreds of thousands of birds were destroyed within a few years. Well over a million short-tailed albatrosses were killed between 1887 and 1903, bringing the species close to extinction and making it so rare that it has been unable to recover from this persecution to this day. In 2004 the Convention for the Protection of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP) , signed by 13 states, came into force.

A colony of 200,000 Laysan aatrosses in the Midway Islands suffered a different fate . A United States Navy air force base has existed here since 1940 . In the first few years there were repeated collisions between aircraft and albatrosses. After the birds could not be driven away with sirens and explosions, the dunes were removed and large parts of the island were paved, so that the possibilities for breeding were no longer given.

The Maori used, at least on New Zealand's South Island, the wing bones of albatrosses to make flutes.

European art and culture, to which the albatross as a non-native bird was initially foreign, the animal only got to know relatively late. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge immortalized in his famous 1798 created ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (dt. Rime of the Ancient Mariner or The old sailor that) - artistic excessive - discomfort of a sailor of killing an albatross. In addition, several later artists named their works after the sea birds: Charles Baudelaire's (1821–1867) poem "L'Albatros" describes the clumsiness of the animal on the ground and compares it with the elegant flight of the animals or the fate of the poet. The band Fleetwood Mac titled an instrumental piece Albatross (1969) and the rock group Karat a song Albatross (1979). In 2008 the French DJ AaronChupa released the song “I'm an Albatraoz”. In the Disney film Bernard and Bianca (1977), the heroes used the "Albatross Airlines", whose pilot, an experienced albatross, shows the typical difficulties both during takeoff and landing.

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Albatros  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Albatrosses (Diomedeidae)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.cn-online.de/stadt-land/news/albatros-ist-auf-helgoland-gelandet.html
  2. ↑ Feathered frequent flyers: Around the world in 46 days. In: Spiegel Online . January 17, 2005, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Hazards to birds - fishing. Retrieved May 12, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Quarks & Co - Evolution Documentation about evolution (occupying position in it from minute 20)
  5. ^ Spiegel Online , accessed October 22, 2009
  6. ↑ Oldest known sea bird: Albatros lays an egg at the age of 66 . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 10, 2016, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed December 10, 2016]).
  7. ^ Carrie Arnold: World's Oldest Wild Bird Has Baby at 66. In: National Geographic. February 17, 2017, accessed October 15, 2017 . {
  8. ^ Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument: World's oldest-known wild bird hatches another chick . Press release from February 4, 2013
  9. ↑ NZZ, January 6, 2018, page 26
  10. ↑ Gerald Mayr, Stefan Peters & Siegfried Rietschel: Petrel-like Birds with a Peculiar Foot Morphology from the Oligocene of Germany and Belgium (Aves: Procellariiformes) . In: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 2002, Issue 22 (3), pp. 667-676
  11. ↑ Gerald Mayr, Thierry Smith: A Fossil Albatross from the Early Oligocene of the North Sea Basin. In: The Auk 129 (1), 2012. doi: 10.1525 / auk.2011.11192 , pp. 87-95. ( Full text ; PDF; 451 kB)
  12. ^ S. Olson, P. Rasmussen: Miocene and Pliocene Birds from the Lee Creek Mine, North Carolina . In: Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 2001, No. 90
  13. ^ Gary Nunn, Scott Stanley: Body size effects and rates of cytochrome b evolution in tube-nosed seabirds . In: Molecular Biology and Evolution 1998, Issue 15 (10), pp. 1360-1371
  14. ^ A b Gary Nunn & al .: Evolutionary relationships among extant albatrosses (Procellariiformes: Diomedeidae) established from complete cytochrome-b sequences . In: The Auk 1996, No. 113, pp. 784-801
  15. ^ Graham Robertson, Rosemary Gales: Albatross Biology and Conservation . Surrey Beatty & Sons, 1998, ISBN 0-949324-82-5
  16. ↑ Thursday, November 24th [1772] - ... Many albatrosses over the ship, some of which we caught with the poker and which were welcome as a change in the diet, even at a time when all the auxiliary workers were being supplied with fresh sheep meat ... - James Cook's log, according to A. Grenfell Price (2005). James Cook. Discovery trips in the Pacific. Edition Erdmann, ISBN 3-86503-024-6 , p. 128.
    in general on albatross hunting [quoted according to Engl. Wikipedia:] M. Cocker, R. Mabey: Birds Britannica London: Chatto & Windus . 2005, ISBN 0-7011-6907-9
  17. ↑ [quoted according to Engl. Wikipedia:] Jonathan Eyers: Don't Shoot the Albatross !: Nautical Myths and Superstitions . A&C Black, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-4081-3131-2 .
  18. ↑ a b From the website of the Chilean Cape Hornier Association: AICH Emblem. ( Memento from June 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ). According to information on the page, the text is a “Synthesis of an article written by the International Secretary General of the AICH, Captain Roger GHYS, as published in LE COURRIER DU CAP N ° 3 of December, 1999. By Rear Admiral Roberto BENAVENTE, President, Chilean Section AICH "
  19. ↑ Mervy Mclean: A chronological and geographical sequence of Maori flute scales . 1982. Man, Vol. 17 Ed. 1 , pp. 123-157.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on June 22, 2006 .