Young Laysan albatrosses born on Oahu return to the island fairly often as youngsters, new research shows.
The conventional wisdom was that the birds stay at sea until they are ready to breed.
Husband-and-wife team Eric VanderWerf and Lindsay Young of Pacific Rim Conservation, a Honolulu-based nonprofit research firm, spent 14 years banding 477 Oahu albatrosses as chicks and monitoring what became of them. Their findings appeared last week in a journal called The Condor: Ornithological Applications.
They found that 2 percent of the birds first returned to the colony as 1-year-olds,
7 percent as 2-year-olds and 17 percent as 3-year-olds. That means that the youngsters, or “pre-breeders,” make up 44 percent of the Oahu population, predominantly at Kaena Point.
Once they made it through their first year after fledging, the annual survival of these young birds was estimated at about 97 percent, the researchers found.
One threat to albatross populations is the mosquito-borne avian pox virus.
“Although albatrosses and many other seabirds have strong immunity to avian pox virus, this disease has a negative long-term effect on their survival and chance of obtaining a mate,” VanderWerf said in a news release. “As more albatrosses relocate to higher islands like Oahu in response to sea level rise, where mosquitoes are more prevalent, this disease, and perhaps others, will become a more important threat to the species, so we need to understand more about it and how to prevent its transmission.”
Oregon State University’s Robert Suryan, a seabird ecologist who was not involved in the study, said it “provides novel insight into early life stage demographics of a long-lived seabird from the long-term study of a small and highly tractable colony.”
The average age when the birds first returned to the natal colony was about 4 years and 3 months.
The total size of the Laysan albatross population on Oahu in 2015 was 555 birds, consisting of 270 active breeders, 231 pre-breeders and 54 others that likely skipped breeding that year.
