Albatrosses Around the Net
From their classroom in a California desert, Michelle Bergey’s third-graders can watch an albatross fly across the sea.
They can trace a bird as it makes its way out of Hawaii, soars over the Pacific Ocean for thousands of miles, even in its sleep, then glides by the Golden Gate Bridge to find food.
Since January, Bergey’s class of 30 at Twentynine Palms Elementary School have been studying the albatross, along with scientists from Winston-Salem, N.C. The students and scientists alike are intent on learning more about the feeding patterns of these mysterious seabirds, whose population is in danger of declining.
Through a newly developed transmitter taped between the birds’ wings and a data collecting system created by David Anderson at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, albatrosses have been taking off into cyberspace as well as for real. This has enabled students from across the country to “adopt” a bird and trace and study its flight patterns for the first time over the Internet.
“One question is, where do they go and why?” said Anderson, a 39-year-old seabird biologist who developed the albatross project. He designed the project primarily to learn how the birds find food and so children across the country could get online and learn about the albatross at the same time scientists receive the information.
Albatrosses “are of particular interest to me because of their reproduction rates,” said Anderson. “Seabird biologists think that reproduction rates have to do with food gathering and foraging.”
Laysan and black-footed albatrosses mate after a lengthy courtship dance. The female lays one egg the size of a soda can every other year, said the biologist, who added that their reproduction rates are much like humans’. Albatross parents have “high mate fidelity,” or a strong tendency to stick together, Anderson said.
Because these birds lay eggs on the ground and have “tasty-looking eggs and tasty-looking chicks,” he said, they lay on oceanic islands where there is a reduced threat of predators. But this means that they must travel far for food, sometimes flying for thousands of miles over a two-week period.
“They are looking for a bonanza of some kind, like a dead whale or squid,” said Anderson. Once it finds food, the male or female albatross swallows large pieces of its prey and “concentrates it in its belly,” then returns to its nest to regurgitate it back to its chicks.
The chicks “can afford to have their parents gone for a long time,” said Anderson, because of the large amount of food the birds regurgitate.
His team of four has been tracing 12 of the black-footed and Laysan species of albatross from Tern Island, a volcanic stretch at the northwestern end of the Hawaiian chain. A transmitter the size of a man’s thumb and weighing just over an ounce monitors the birds’ distance via satellite. The information, first processed in France, comes to Anderson in North Carolina 24 hours later. Though the data are a day old, Anderson said he can get a good idea of where a bird is.
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In recent years, two of 24 species of albatrosses in Australia and New Zealand have been on the endangered list because of long-line fishing, said Beth Flint, a wildlife biologist for the Pacific Remote Island National Wildlife Refuge.
Long-line fishing uses a 20- to 80-foot line that has thousands of hooks attached all along it. Each hook has bait that targets a specific type and size of fish. But the process also catches marine turtles and birds. The birds tend to follow the boats around for food, and when they dive for the bait, they get caught on the hooks and drown, said Flint.
Flint said she hopes that Anderson’s findings, which have already been presented to the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council, will help persuade the council to adopt alternatives to the way fish are caught.
In the Pacific Ocean, there are already “corridors” established where long-line fishing is prohibited to protect Hawaiian seals. But Flint said this may be an impossible alternative for albatrosses, which travel alone, not in colonies, and without any apparent regular flight route.
“It’s really valuable information . . . where the birds go and how they use the ocean, because once they go out to sea, we don’t know much about how they feed or how they travel,” he said.
For Anderson, who received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the project illuminates two of his goals: to learn more about a seabird that interests him, and to share his knowledge with students.
“Around middle school, kids feel uninvited and uninterested in science, particularly girls and minority students,” said Anderson. With this project, he says, he doesn’t want kids to necessarily become scientists, “but science-literate. The other cool thing is that the data we produce [are] easy to understand.” Data are compiled on maps that use the basic principles of coordinates, measuring longitude and latitude.
Schoolchildren can pick a bird that has been previously numbered and follow it on the maps. And while Anderson said he and his team have found themselves occasionally rooting for a specific bird to make it across the ocean, he has no favorites.
“I love all my children,” said Anderson of the albatrosses. “They are all doing fascinating things. I just didn’t think a bird would go from Hawaii to San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge, and come back to feed its chicks. I didn’t expect birds to go to the North American coast,” he said.
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For third-grade teacher Bergey, studying the albatross combines all the elements associated with learning about animals in general, such as life cycle, habitat, behavior, food chain and migration. Bergey discovered the project in an education magazine.
“We don’t have the Internet at school, so in the morning I get the data [from home] and print it off,” she said. Sometimes her students try to come up with theories as to why albatrosses fly so far for food.
“We think it’s like why people will drive farther to go to their favorite restaurant for better food to eat,” she said.
Recently her students have been wondering how El Nino affects the birds’ flight patterns. But because scientists have only begun to track albatrosses this year, the kids will have to wait until it is a non-El Nino year to make comparisons. Anderson said scientists will replicate the study again next January, when albatrosses begin to mate.
Other children are amazed that albatrosses can sleep while engaging in dynamic soaring, a process of gliding using various wind speeds so they do not have to flap their wings. Albatross wingspans can measure up to 11 feet.
Through the project, Bergey’s students have also developed essential mapping skills.
“We could have never done something like this from the middle of the desert,” she said.
The Albatross Project Web site is: https://www.wfu.edu/albatross
