Kauai, one of the USA’s inhabited Hawaiian Islands in the North Pacific, supports several populations of Laysan Albatrosses Phoebastria immutabilis.  Although small, these populations are considered significant because their height puts them above predicted sea-level rises which are thought will seriously impact the much larger Laysan Albatrosses populations on the low-lying North Western Hawaiian islands.  The Kauai albatrosses differ in their levels of protection and management, so are here treated as four separate populations.

The North-east Kauai and Princeville populations are marked in green

Around 130 pairs breed within the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge, although they are not readily visible to the public.  Secure breeding opportunity within this refuge has recently been expanded by the building of a predator-proof fence.

Farther west on the island approximately 40 pairs breed within the community of Princeville where they are studied and protected by concerned inhabitants (click here)

Over 80 pairs attempt to breed annually on the south-west shore of Kauai within the US Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands (click here).  Because these birds are a collision hazard to aircraft their eggs are removed each year; some of which have been given to foster parents elsewhere on the island as a conservation measure (click here).

In addition to these three separate populations, Laysan Albatrosses breed on private lands along the north-east coast of Kauai, in a 16-km stretch from Princeville to Anahola, east of Kilauea Point.

Four well-fenced spots occur in this coastal region where the birds are well protected but in unfenced sections breeding Laysans are at risk to domestic dogs Canis familiaris that are allowed to roam loose, with 25 adult birds known to have been killed by dogs in the 2012/13 breeding season.  Hawaiian Department of Land and Natural Resources staff then went door-to-door in the neighbourhood and the killings stopped.  Live traps have been used on unfenced properties to catch the most problematic dogs.  Feral cats Felis catus are also deemed to be a problem and control activities take place by volunteers of the Kaua‘i Albatross Network.

Laysan Albatrosses of the north-east shore of Kauai

The combined total of the Princeville to Anahola private properties saw 59 chicks fledge from 87 eggs laid (of which 68 hatched) in the 2013/2014 breeding season.  Some 10-25% of the breeding birds are female-female pairs which lay double clutches (click here), giving opportunities for cross-fostering with eggs from Barking Sands, as has happened recently in the privately-owned Na Aina Kai Botanical Gardens.  Non-breeding birds caught and banded at Barking Sands have also been released in the botanical gardens for some years, some of which have commenced to breed.  In the past translocated birds were released within the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge but this apparently no longer occurs.

An incubating Laysan Albatross

A live-streaming remote camera operated by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology set up on a secure property in north-east Kauai went live on 27 January this year.  Over the next five months until the chick (named "Kaloakulua", which refers to a phase of the moon when it hatched) successfully fledged in late June the “TrossCam” received nearly two million hits from 195 countries, with regular write-ups being posted.  One notable event was when a stray dog showed up a few metres from the chick, fortunately without harming it (click here).  The dog was later live-trapped and adopted.

The albatross camera along with the chick it watched

All photographs by Hob Osterlund

It is intended to use the camera at a nearby nest site in the 2014/15 season now that egg-laying has commenced.

Global Positioning System (GPS) tags were placed on 12 adult birds in the Na Aina Kai Botanical Gardens this year as part of a collaborative study of the at-sea movements of several Hawaiian seabird species by Pacific Rim Conservation, Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center (WERC-USGS).  The birds have been tracked at sea for up to 79 days (click here).  In addition, Kaloakulua received an archival geolocator tag before fledging in the hope it could be recovered for downloading when it returns to land after its first few years at sea as a juvenile.

With thanks to Lindsay Young, ACAP North Pacific News Correspondent, for information.

Selected Literature:

Arata, J.A., Sievert, P.R. & Naughton, M.B. 2009.  Status Assessment of Laysan and Black-footed Albatrosses, North Pacific Ocean, 1923-2000.  U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2009-5131.  Reston: U.S. Geological Survey.

Duffy, D.C. 2010.  Changing seabird management in Hawai'i: from exploitation through management to restoration.  Waterbirds 33: 193-207.

Naughton, M.B., Romano, M.D. & Zimmerman, T.S. 2007.  A Conservation Action Plan for Black-footed Albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) and Laysan Albatross (P. immutabilis).  Version 1.0.

Pyle, R.L. & Pyle, P. 2009.  The Birds of the Hawaiian Islands: Occurrence, History, Distribution, and Status.  Honolulu: B.P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu.

Vanderwerf, E.A. 2012.  Albatrosses.  In:  Hawaiian Bird Conservation Action Plan.  Honolulu: Pacific Rim Conservation.  11 pp.

Waid, R. 2005.  The Majestic Albatross. Images of Kauai's Beloved Seabirds.  Honolulu: Mutual Publishing.  51 pp.

Young, L.C. & VanderWerf, E.A. 2014.  Adaptive value of same-sex pairing in Laysan albatross.   Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences  doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.2473.

Young, L.C., Vanderwerf, E.A., Granholm, C., Osterlund, H., Steutermann, K. & Savre, T. 2014.  Breeding performance of Laysan Albatrosses Phoebastria immutabilis in a foster parent program.  Marine Ornithology 42: 99-103.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer & Hob Osterlund, Kauai Albatross Network, 14 December 2014

Graham Martin (School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, UK) and Rory Crawford (RSPB) have published an open-access review in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation on reducing bycatch of seabirds (including procellariiform species such as shearwaters) and other marine taxa in gill nets.  “[F]or gillnet bycatch to be reduced, the actual nets need to be made more visible to non-target vertebrates.”

The paper’s abstract follows:

“Sensory capacities and perceptual challenges faced by gillnet bycatch taxa result from fundamental physiological limits on vision and constraints arising within underwater environments.  To reduce bycatch in birds, sea turtles, pinnipeds and blue-water fishes, individuals must be alerted to the presence of nets using visual cues.  Cetaceans will benefit but they also require warning with cues detected through echolocation.  Characteristics of a visual warning stimulus must accommodate the restricted visual capacities of bycatch species and the need to maintain vision in a dark adapted state when foraging.  These requirements can be provided by a single type of visual warning stimulus: panels containing a pattern of low spatial frequency and high internal contrast.  These are likely to be detectable across a range of underwater light environments by all bycatch prone taxa, but are unlikely to reduce the catch of target fish species.  Such panels should also be readily detectable by cetaceans using echolocation.  Use of sound signals to warn about the presence of gillnets is not recommended because of the poor sound localisation abilities of bycatch taxa, cetaceans excepted.  These warning panels should be effective as a mitigation measure for all bycatch species, relatively easy to deploy and of low cost.”

Shearwaters: at risk to drowning in gill nets, Photograph by Vero Cortes

Reference: 

Martin, G.R. & Crawford, R, 2015.  Reducing bycatch in gillnets: A sensory ecology perspective.  Global Ecology and Conservation 3: 28-50.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 13 December 2014

A number of Marine Protected Areas offers at-sea protection to ACAP-listed albatrosses and petrels (click here).  All these MPAs or equivalents include within their boundaries islands or island groups which are breeding sites for one or more of the 30 ACAP-listed species. Several of them are situated in the North Pacific and Southern Oceans.

In recent years very large MPAs that are more than or approach 100 000 km² in size have been declared or expanded.  Eight of them that surround island groups supporting ACAP-listed species total over 3.34 million square kilometres.

In order of the year of their original designation these eight very large MPAs are:

Galapagos Marine Reserve, Ecuador, 1998, 133 000 km²

Macquarie Island Nature Reserve and Marine Park, Australia, 1999, 162 000 km²

Heard and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve, Australia, 2002 & 2014, 71 200 km²

Papāhanaumokuākea Marine National Monument, USA, 2006, 362 074 km²

Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, USA, 2009 & 2014, 1 270 000 km²

South Orkney Islands Southern Shelf MPA, 2009, CCAMLR, 94 000 km²

South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands (Islas Georgias del Sur y Islas Sandwich del Sur)* MPA, disputed, 2010, 1 070 000 km²

Prince Edward Islands MPA, South Africa, 013, 180 000 km²

Overall, MPAs cover around one percent of the World’s oceans and seas.

John Cooper ACAP Information Officer,12 November 2014

*A dispute exists between the Governments of Argentina and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland concerning sovereignty over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (Islas Georgias del Sur y Islas Sandwich del Sur) and the surrounding maritime areas.

Raül Ramos (Department of Animal Biology, University of Barcelona, Spain) and colleagues have published this month in the journal The American Naturalist on the transference of antibodies from vaccinated female Cory's Shearwaters Calonectris borealis to their chicks via their egg yolks.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“Although little studied in natural populations, the persistence of immunoglobulins may dramatically affect the dynamics of immunity and the ecology and evolution of host-pathogen interactions involving vertebrate hosts.  By means of a multiple-year vaccination design against Newcastle disease virus, we experimentally addressed whether levels of specific antibodies can persist over several years in females of a long-lived procellariiform seabird—Cory’s shearwater—and whether maternal antibodies against that antigen could persist over a long period in offspring several years after the mother was exposed.  We found that a single vaccination led to high levels of antibodies for several years and that the females transmitted antibodies to their offspring that persisted for several weeks after hatching even 5 years after a single vaccination.  The temporal persistence of maternally transferred antibodies in nestlings was highly dependent on the level at hatching.  A second vaccination boosted efficiently the level of antibodies in females and thus their transfer to offspring.  Overall, these results stress the need to consider the temporal dynamics of immune responses if we are to understand the evolutionary ecology of host-parasite interactions and trade-offs between immunity and other life-history characteristics, in particular in long-lived species.  They also have strong implications for conservation when vaccination may be used in natural populations facing disease threats.”

Cory’s Shearwater and chick, photograph by Raül Ramos

Click here for a news article on the publication.

Reference:

Ramos, R., Garnier, R., González-Solís, J. & Boulinier, T. 2014.  Long antibody persistence and transgenerational transfer of immunity in a long-lived vertebrate.  The American Naturalist 184: 764-776.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 11 December 2014