Tern Island Albatrosses - 1999

Occurrence Observation
Latest version published by OBIS-SEAMAP on Oct 7, 2025 OBIS-SEAMAP

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Description

Original provider: Wake Forest University Dataset credits: National Science Foundation Abstract: Satellite telemetry was used to identify the foraging distributions of two congeneric species of albatrosses that nest in the tropics/subtropics. Breeding black-footed albatross (<i>Phoebastria nigripes</i>) and Laysan albatross (<i>Phoebastria immutabilis</i>) nesting in Tern Island (Northwest Hawaiian Islands) and tracked during the 1998 breeding season (January - June) performed foraging trips to continental shelves off North America. Black-footed albatross made long trips to the west coast of North America (British Columbia to California). Laysan albatross traveled primarily to the north of the Hawaiian Islands, and reached the waters of the Aleutian Islands and the Gulf of Alaska. These albatross species mixed short and long trips during the chick-rearing period (February - June), but engaged in short foraging trips during the brooding period (within 18 days after chick hatched, January - February).<br><br> In 1999, the breeding success of both albatross species was depressed, with a large-scale failure for the Laysan albatross. Out of nine black-footed albatross tracked, two chicks died during this study. Out of sixteen Laysan albatross tracked, the eggs of seven birds did not hatch and eight chicks died during the tracking study. Due to this massive breeding failure, the satellite tracked birds abandoned their colony and dispersed widely across the North Pacific Ocean. Thus, the 1998 (central-place foraging) and 1999 (dispersal from colonies) tracking data should be considered separately.

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 4,630 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Anderson, D. 2013. Tern Island Albatrosses - 1999. Version 1.0.0. Dataset published in OBIS-SEAMAP. https://doi.org/10.82144/ab0fa19c.

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is OBIS-SEAMAP. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 91a26b5b-8cc6-490a-a1bc-bf37e672ac72.  OBIS-SEAMAP publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Ocean Biodiversity Information System.

Keywords

Marine Biology; Telemetry; Tagged animal; albatross; satellite tracking; North Pacific Ocean; Hawaii; Radio transmitters; Animal movements; Occurrence; Observation

External data

The resource data is also available in other formats

OBIS-SEAMAP Dataset Page https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/314 UTF-8 Interactive map
FGDC Metadata https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/314/fgdc UTF-8 XML
EML Metadata https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/314/eml UTF-8 XML

Contacts

David Anderson
  • Owner
  • Originator
  • Point Of Contact
  • Primary contact
Wake Forest University
OBIS-SEAMAP
  • Metadata Provider
  • Distributor
Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Duke University
  • A328 LSRC building
27708 Durham
NC
US

Geographic Coverage

Western Pacific sector

Bounding Coordinates South West [18.054, 140.054], North East [51.253, 180]

Taxonomic Coverage

Scientific names are based on the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS).

Species Phoebastria immutabilis (Laysan albatross), Phoebastria nigripes (Black-footed albatross)

Temporal Coverage

Start Date / End Date 1999-01-15 / 1999-06-10

Project Data

No Description available

Title Tern Island Albatrosses - 1999
Funding NA

The personnel involved in the project:

David Anderson
  • Owner

Sampling Methods

NA

Study Extent NA

Method step description:

  1. NA

Collection Data

Collection Name zd_314
Collection Identifier zd_314
Parent Collection Identifier OBIS-SEAMAP

Bibliographic Citations

  1. Fernandez P., D.J. Anderson, P.R. Sievert, and K. Huyvaert. 2001. Foraging destinations of three low-latitude albatross (Phoebastria) species. Journal of Zoology254: 391-404. http://wfu.edu/~djanders/labweb/reprints/Fernandez%20et%20al%202001.pdf

Additional Metadata

marine, harvested by iOBIS. These albatross were tracked using PTT-100 Argos transmitters (Microwave Telemetry, Columbia, MD) operating at a 90-second repetition rate and programmed to operate on a 8:24 h ON:OFF duty cycle. Transmitter bench-tests before deployment revealed that the Argos location quality classes (lcs) had the following median position errors, expressed in kilometers: lc B (8.46), lc A (3.29), lc 0 (4.80), lc 1 (1.96), lc 2 (0.49), and lc 3 (0.26).

The low-quality class B locations were discarded because they mis-represented the telemetry tracks. Thus, this dataset includes 4635 high-quality locations (lc classes A or better) with median positional errors <4 km.

Purpose

The 1999 data provided information on albatross movements during a year of depressed reproductive success, when many birds abandoned the colony. An understanding on the interplay between the distribution and the reproductive success of North Pacific albatrosses has important implications for assessing how oceanographic variability influences their population dynamics.<br><br> We thank C. Alexander, L. Carsten, P. Fernández, F. Juola, P. Sievert, A. Viggiano and S. Wang for assistance in the field, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for logistical support. This research was funded by National Science Foundation grant DEB 9629539 to D. Anderson.

Alternative Identifiers https://doi.org/10.82144/ab0fa19c
https://www.gbif.org/dataset/91a26b5b-8cc6-490a-a1bc-bf37e672ac72
https://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/314
https://obis.org/dataset/b578c2df-bfbb-460b-963a-d1a9d117c2dc
91a26b5b-8cc6-490a-a1bc-bf37e672ac72
https://ipt.env.duke.edu/resource?r=zd_314