Flight map for Pitt Island's Antipodean Albatross fledgling as at 14 July 2021

A single pair of globally Endangered and Nationally Critical Antipodean Albatrosses Diomedea antipodensis has bred on Pitt Island in New Zealand’s Chatham Islands group in recent years (click here). The latest chick was banded (R-50441) and satellite-tagged on 23 December 2020.  By 9 March it had flown over 19 000 km, spending it’s time to the east of New Zealand (click here).  A recent update on Facebook by David Boyle on the bird’s travels at sea shows that it has remained relatively close to New Zealand, within and outside the country’s Economic Exclusion Zone:

“Just before Christmas we put a satellite tracker on the Antipodes Wanderer chick on Pitt Island - it fledged a few days later and seven months later it’s still going strong.  The map’s a bit of a mess but he went out east to the Louisville Ridge first off (the long chain of seamounts to the east of the Chathams), then headed west and spent some time off East Cape/Gisborne before doing a big loop south almost to Antipodes Island before heading back up the east coast of New Zealand and round the top into the Tasman for ages and now he's come back round the top of New Zealand and is currently about 500 km north of the Chathams.”

Pitt Island's Antipodean Albatross chick close to fledging in December 2020

View the Pitt Island albatross flight map that shows the bird (206373 R-50441) had flown nearly 45 000 km by 14 July.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 28 July 2021

Off to the Olympics: Toroa on its launch day, being sailed by Pete Burling and Blair Tuke; photograph from Ruby Dreifuss, Live Ocean

ACAP Latest News has previously reported on medal-winning 2016 Olympic, America’s Cup and Round-the-World sailors, Peter Burling and Blair Tuke from New Zealand, who have been sailing in support of the globally Endangered Antipodean Albatross Diomedea antipodensis, a New Zealand endemic, via the marine conservation charitable trust, Live Ocean.  This year they have been training for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, competing in their 49er skiff named Toroa, the Maori name for a great albatross in the genus Diomedea.

Antipodean Albatross off North Cape, New Zealand; photograph by Kirk Zufelt

Read about the New Zealand team and their competitors at the 2020 Olympics here.

Pete and Blair's first race in the Men’s Skiff -49er event is today in the Enoshima Yacht Harbour.  The final medal race is on 2 August.  Here’s hoping Toroa will be moving fast in support of its namesake albatross!

Thanks to Ruby Dreifuss and Sally Paterson, Live Ocean.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 27 July 2021

Yawning for the camera. A Tristan Albatross on Gough Island, photograph by Tom McSherry

To date, the Gough Island Restoration Programme (GIRP) has completed the first bait drop over the island to eradicate the island’s albatross-killing mice and is waiting for good weather to undertake the required second drop.  In the interim researchers on the island have continued to monitor breeding by the Critically Endangered (and near-endemic) Tristan Albatross Diomedea dabbenena, as recently reported via the GIRP Facebook page.

“Our team just returned from two of our 11 Tristan Albatross monitoring sites– Gonydale and Tafelkop – and reported no nest failures since their last check!  This is literally unheard of at this time of year.  Even though we haven’t completed the second bait drop yet we can already get a sense of what life would be like on Gough without the mice.”

Watch a video as GIRP Researcher Michelle Risi imparts the news in front of a Tristan Albatross chick in the Tafelkop monitoring colony, first set up in the 1980s.

ACAP’s Information Officer has a particular interest in the fate of the Tristan Albatross on Gough.  He set up both long-term study colonies - on Tafelkop in the 1980s and in Gonydale in the 2006/07 and 2007/08 breeding seasons - when all the occupied nests in the two localities were staked and breeding adults metal and colour-banded during incubation, with their surviving chicks metal banded later in the year.  Monitoring has continued ever since with pairs of field workers being appointed on an annual basis.

Access the latest (No. 8, May 2021) and earlier editions of Island Restoration News, the GIRP newsletter here.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 26 July 2021

Southern Giant Petrel watercolour by Shary Weckwerth, from a photograph by Michelle Risi 

Sun-Hee Kim (Department of Biotechnology, College of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Korea University, Seoul, Korea) and colleagues have published in the open access online journal Animals on the genome of the Southern Giant Petrel Macronectes giganteus.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“The southern giant petrel Macronectes giganteus, a large seabird of the southern oceans, is one of only two members of the genus Macronectes and is the largest species in the order Procellariiformes [sic].  Although these two families [sic] account for the vast majority of the avian fauna inhabiting the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic regions, studies on the status of some populations and the associated genetic data are currently extremely limited.  In this study, we assembled the genome of M. giganteus by integrating Pacific Biosciences single-molecule real-time sequencing and the Chromium system developed by 10x Genomics.  The final M. giganteus genome assembly was 1.248 Gb in size with a scaffold N50 length of 27.4 Mb and a longest scaffold length of 120.4 Mb.  The M. giganteus genome contains 14,993 predicted protein-coding genes and has 11.06% repeat sequences.  Estimated historical effective population size analysis indicated that the southern giant petrel underwent a severe reduction in effective population size during a period coinciding with the early Pleistocene.  The availability of this newly sequenced genome will facilitate more effective genetic monitoring of threatened species.  Furthermore, the genome will provide a valuable resource for gene functional studies and further comparative genomic studies on the life history and ecological traits of specific avian species.”

Reference:

Kim, S.-H., Lee, S.-J., Jo, E., Kim, J., Kim, J.-U., Kim, J.-H., Park, H. & Chi, Y.-M.  2021.  Genome of the Southern Giant Petrel assembled using third-generation DNA sequencing and linked reads reveals evolutionary traits of southern avian [sic].  Animals 11.  doi.org/10.3390/ani11072046.

John Cooper. ACAP Information Officer, 23 July 2021