Wandering Albatross Birds Benefit From Increased Wind Speeds, Linked To Climate Change

Surprisingly, climate change may actually benefit one species ... in the short-term.

The Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans), which has the largest wingspan of any living bird species and spends most of its life in the air, is benefitting from wind speeds in the Southern Ocean that have increased in the past three decades, according to new research.

The results of the study, which were published this week in Science, show that increased wind speeds are not just causing the albatross to fly faster. ScienceNOW reports that the birds have, "on average, gained weight and bred more successfully."

Easier flights mean shorter foraging trips and fewer abandoned eggs. In fact, the percentage of eggs that produced live albatross chicks increased by 11 percent between 1970 and 2008. The birds have also put on weight, possibly to compensate for stronger wind patterns. According to ScienceNOW, the average weight of a Wandering Albatross has increased by over two pounds, or 10 to 12 percent of their body mass, in the past 20 years.

The research team, led by Henri Weimerskirch from France's Centre d'Etudes Biologiques de Chize, focused their study on albatross populations near the Crozet Islands in the Southern Ocean.

Weimerskirch explained to Discovery News, "Winds have increased overall at the world's oceans, with some areas being more affected than others, but still the increase is global. The advantage we have with the Crozet is that we have a long term record of the population parameters, and also the movements of the birds, which is a unique situation."

The oceanic wind changes may benefit the birds now, but long-term climate change may have a negative effect. The New York Times reports climate pattern predictions for the end of the century suggest storms so frequent and intense that conditions will be "unfavorable for [the birds'] dynamic soaring flights."

Wandering Albatross are currently listed as "vulnerable" on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. According to PhysOrg, longline fishing operations and human-generated ocean debris have had a negative impact on albatross populations.

Comments

[Imago1122]

08:09 PM on 01/16/2012

This report makes sense. I was aware that male and female wanderers had tended to forage different parts of the ocean and that typically the larger males with their heavier wing loadings preferred the faster, more furious winds that encircle Antarctica and its neighboring islands while the lighter females favored the gentler winds of the more subtropical islands to the north. Juveniles, lighter and more inexperienced still than the females, foraged even farther up north.

I wonder if the increased wind speeds in the Southwestern Indian Ocean will change this pattern, effectively putting an end to this segregation at sea along the lines of gender and age.

Albatross are among the world's most specialized birds: with their long thin wings, they glide with hardly a flap across great distances in and out of the wind's teeth. Scientists have found they expend more energy in landing and taking off than they do in holding their wings outstretched when their hearts beat almost as if they're at rest. On becalmed days they prefer to loaf about on the sea as they wait for the next gust of weather.

I find in their mastery of wind a perfect metaphor for stillness, for calm and control in a world where the only thing we can be certain of is change.

[JohnGault3]

12:48 PM on 01/16/2012

GW will help everyone, anyway it is impossible to stop so get used to it if it happens.

[Jim Milks]

12:18 PM on 01/21/2012

"GW will help everyone"

Not everyone, as global warming is already cutting into crop production around the world (Lobell et al. 2011: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6042/616.abstract), killing trees in the Amazon and the western US (Pennisi 2009: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5913/447.short; Toomey et al. 2011: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL049041.shtml), forcing species to move toward the poles (Chen et al. 2011: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6045/1024), and increasing heat stress on humans and other species (Sherwood and Huber 2010: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/04/26/0913352107.full.pdf), among other negative effects.

[niumarmion]

06:54 PM on 01/14/2012

All of the benefits are short term.

[banana republican]

01:05 PM on 01/14/2012

Increased wind speeds means more windmill energy. The warm winter here in PA means I burn less heating oil. I don't have to idle my cars for 15 minutes before going to work each morning. The township doesn't have to drive those big trucks around plowing snow. Multiply that by a few ten millions and think how much less C02 is going into into the atmospher.

[niumarmion]

06:52 PM on 01/14/2012

Not enough to offset the increasing use of coal by China and India to name just one example of increasing CO2 causes.

[ThinkCreeps]

03:51 AM on 01/14/2012

It's not benefiting much from long-line fishing.

[Counterintuitive]

06:37 PM on 01/13/2012

So first we learned that Climate Change might help a tiny lizard, and now it might help some birds temporarily. So I guess if hundreds of other species go extinct, we can still hold our heads high.

[maslin]

07:19 PM on 02/12/2012

Do you have any idea what happened with the comment removals below your post? I know what at least one of them was, and I see no reason whatsoever that it should have been removed.