Featured Story
April 2008
| ||
|
|
|
Albatrosses are diverse in form and range, but they share a common problem: people.
By Mark Jones ~ Photographs by Tui De Roy
No self-respecting birdwatcher should mistake an albatross for a pelican, right? Yet etymologists can trace the word albatross back through the annals of early seafarers’ logbooks—albatross . . . algatross . . . alcatrass—to a Portuguese word, alcatráz, which was used for a variety of large seabirds. And alcatraz, a word now famous as the name of the old island prison in San Francisco Bay, probably came from an Arabic term, al-câdous, or “bucket”-mouthed bird—the pelican. Pelicans, though, never venture far beyond the coasts and live to perhaps twenty years of age. Albatrosses live forty to sixty years and are adapted to the open ocean—with special salt-excreting glands that enable them to drink seawater; well-developed olfaction for tracking down food; and superb navigation skills that guide them back to isolated specks of land for breeding.
Although a pelican and an albatross can hardly be confused, even the sophisticated birdwatcher may find it a challenge to distinguish among all twenty-two albatross species (the number currently recognized
| ||
|
| |
Long before our forebears were naming them or having any effect on them, albatrosses were riding the winds and waves. The earliest fossils of recognizable albatrosses and their closest kin, the petrels, date back some 32 million years, and come from places as disparate as modern-day South Carolina and Germany. At least 9 million years ago, genera very similar to living species were ranging over the Southern Ocean, the North Pacific, and the North Atlantic.
Albatrosses are found today throughout the southern oceans, but in the Northern Hemisphere they are limited to North Pacific waters. Fossil evidence suggests that most species may have disappeared from the North Atlantic during the time period when the North and South American continents became connected by the Isthmus of Panama, about 3.7 million years ago. These days when southern individuals occasionally stray into North Atlantic skies they can get stranded there, in confusion.
The majority of albatross colonies are located far south of the equator, on the remotest islands in the inhospitable, uninhabited reaches of the Southern Ocean. Colonies in the tropical and subtropical latitudes of the North Pacific, though, are more easily accessible to people and have been greatly impacted by that exposure.
| ||
|
|
|
Fowling, such as it was known, was banned by Japan in 1906, yet it continued illegally in Japanese waters—and elsewhere—for many years afterward. The birds have also succumbed to less deliberate assaults. In the late 1930s, Midway, a sandy atoll in the Hawaii archipelago, was bulldozed and partly paved over with concrete to become a U.S. naval air base, which would be crucial for transpacific wartime flights. The atoll was an important nesting ground for the Laysan albatross, and collisions between birds and planes became a major hazard for aviators and albatrosses alike. More recently, since the atoll was made a National Wildlife Refuge in 1988 and the Navy departed in the 1990s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and armies of volunteer conservationists have been fighting battles of a different kind on Midway, combating introduced plants that choke prime nesting habitat. Even the aging buildings are proving deadly: albatross chicks unlucky enough to hatch near them get poisoned when they eat chips of the peeling lead-based paints. Plastics, too, picked up at sea by parents and fed unwittingly to chicks, are wreaking havoc.
The greatest overall threat to albatross survival, however, whether in the north or in the south, is the world’s ever-expanding appetite for seafood. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, an international fishing fleet of about 4 million vessels supplies every person on Earth with an average of thirty-five pounds of seafood annually. More than 60 percent of all that fish and shellfish is wild caught in marine waters. No part of the world’s oceans, the albatrosses’ far-reaching fishing ground, is untouched.
| ||
|
| |
| ||
Albatrosses and petrels range far and wide precisely because catching prey is not easy. Their access to the ocean’s bounty is limited to the depth they can reach from the surface, and as far as we know, only a few albatross species can dive deeper than a few feet. When vessels ply the oceans to catch fish and squid, they bring to the surface large quantities of the same elusive resource that large seabirds strive to capture. And so birds have been using men to fish for them since whaling ships first took to the sea. Ocean sailors like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner encountered albatrosses not only because the birds spent most of their lives flying far out at sea, but because they followed ships for days, hoping for a bonanza offish offal, bait, or food scraps.
With the invention of modern methods of longline fishing and trawling, this otherwise rewarding habit has turned deadly. A baited longline hook will float astern of a vessel until the weight of the rig drags it down, and during that floating period, from a seabird’s point of view it is an irresistible morsel, indistinguishable from any other. Longlines, used to catch tuna, swordfish, and other prized open-ocean species, can be as much as ninety miles long, bearing thousands of hooks baited with squid and fish. Hungry albatrosses take the bait, get hooked, and are dragged to their deaths. Annual kill estimates are hotly debated in both science and fishing forums, but no one disputes a toll at least in the many tens of thousands, and some estimate a rate of up to 100,000 a year. Recently, scientists have been surprised to discover that accidental collisions with the steel cables, or "warps," of bottom-trawling ships are just as deadly to albatrosses.
In recent years, huge advances have been made in devising and deploying methods to reduce the incidental killing of birds—though the challenge is to convince all fishing fleets to apply the techniques. Birds can be discouraged from lingering in danger zones by the use of tori lines, a bird-scaring device consisting of an array of dangling streamers or wands. With the incentive of lucrative prizes and international
| ||
|
| |
On a positive note, most albatross colonies today are among the most rigorously protected and intensely managed lands in the world. Six island groups where albatrosses breed are World Heritage Sites: the Galápagos; Gough and Inaccessible islands in the South Atlantic; the New Zealand Subantarctic Islands; Macquarie, between Australia and Antarctica; Heard and McDonald, between Madagascar and Antarctica; and Mewstone and Pedra Branca, included in Tasmania’s Wilderness Area. Legacies of alien species, such as the carnivorous house mouse on Gough Island—which has evolved to more than twice the size of its stowaway ancestors—may still undermine some conservation measures. Gradual successes, however, such as the eradication of rats from New Zealand’s subantarctic Campbell Island, give promise of success in safeguarding breeding sites worldwide.
“I now belong to a higher cult of mortals, for I have seen the albatross!” So exulted American ornithologist and conservationist Robert Cushman Murphy, on a 1912 voyage to the Southern Ocean. Let us hope that we can preserve the birds for future mariners, and so boast in our own way, “We now belong to a higher cult of mortals, for we have helped save the albatross!”
Web links related to this article:
Based in New Zealand, nature photographers and writers Tui De Roy and Mark Jones, seen here aboard their specially outfitted high-seas yacht Mahalia, have spent the last six years documenting all the world’s albatross species. Their work appears in Albatross: Their World, Their Ways (Firefly, fall 2008). To learn more about De Roy and her partnership with the International League of Conservation Photo- graphers, visit www.ilcp.com. |
Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2008