Fun with Science Club®


			Do wandering albatrosses really wander? Carrie Straight 05.25.01 Albatrosses are one of the longest living birds in the wild. Along with having a long life span, they travel great distances when they are not breeding. The wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) breeds every two years. They spend a year raising only one young, then take the next year off, but where exactly they go when they are not breeding was a mystery. Two scientists from France wanted to solve that mystery. Because most conventional methods are expensive (using radio tags and tracking the birds by plane or satellite), they developed an alternate method to track these birds. They placed devices on the legs of the albatrosses that had internal clocks and measured the amount of light available. The next time the birds returned to the nesting beach the researchers caught the albatrosses with the transmitters and removed the transmitter. The researchers downloaded the information off of the transmitters. By doing this, the researchers could estimate when the time of sunrise and sunset. By knowing the number of daylight hours and their place of release, the researchers could estimate each bird’s location. These birds can fly thousands of miles. Of the nine birds with loggers, 4 flew to a specific area of the ocean where they spent the winter from 1500-8500 km (932-5282 miles) away from their breeding grounds. The distance from Atlanta to San Francisco is around 2500 miles, and the distance from Paris, France to Krakow, Poland is just over 1500 km. The two females flew to tropical and subtropical areas, and the two males flew to the sub-Antarctic and Antarctic waters. The wandering albatross got its species' name because people thought they wandered the ocean aimlessly, but really, they don’t wander. They go to a specific place and spend the winter there.


			Weimerskirch, Henri, and Rory P. Wilson. 2000. Oceanic respite for wandering albatrosses. Nature 406: 955-956.