“Previous successful females are the ones that are most affected by this ,” Ventura says. And digging deeper, the team found that, in warmer years, female albatross were also more likely to leave their mate even after successful breeding attempts. Warmer sea conditions were associated with more of the albatross divorcing because of breeding failures. In a paper published on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Ventura and his team concluded that warmer sea temperatures are linked to higher divorce rates among New Island’s black-browed albatrosses-providing the first evidence of environmental conditions increasing such rates among a wild monogamous population, the researchers say. This throws breeding schedules into disarray and increases stress levels among breeding pairs-both factors that can decrease breeding success. As a result, albatross must travel farther and struggle more to find enough food. Increasing sea-surface temperatures, on the other hand, limit the nutrients available to foraging albatross by curbing the production of phytoplankton, which has cascading effects on the rest of the marine food web. Higher winds make it easier for them to soar for greater distances to gather food. Each affects the birds in different ways. To deduce what caused these divorce spikes, the team focused on two environmental variables vital to albatross: wind speed and sea surface temperature. “There were clearly years in which more pairs split up, compared to the previous years,” says Ventura, whose team combed through about 15 years of breeding data. Though divorce is natural among albatross, Ventura recently began noticing that its rates seemed to vary from year to year among the roughly 15,500 pairs of black-browed albatross breeding on New Island, a rocky outcrop within the Falkland Islands. Often, when a female albatross deems the partnership unsuccessful over the course of a year, she will simply appear with a different male in the following breeding season. The process is relatively understated and free from noisy squabbles, says University of Lisbon biologist Francesco Ventura. As is the case with other monogamous species, female birds in the albatross family will leave a partnership that lacks breeding success. Their romantic-seeming “marriages” have a practical purpose: staying with the same partner builds trust, which is essential as the pair alternates between lengthy foraging trips and egg-incubation duties.īut “ divorce” is not unheard of. These large seabirds, whose dark eyebrows shadow their eyes like mascara, are socially monogamous and often mate for life. Few animals seem more affectionate than black-browed albatross.
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