LOL, I did another clickbait headline! Watch out for “10 facts about seahorses you didn’t know”!
But the big news is that a Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis), named Wisdom by her banders, has just laid an egg—64 years after she was presumed to have been born. This is the oldest banded bird ever recorded, and she’s still going strong.
As the Guardian reports, in a post amusingly called “When I’m sixty-four: world’s oldest tracked bird returns to refuge with mate” (get the reference?), Wisdom has made a nest on Midway Atoll and has laid a single egg. That’s the brood size for all members of this species, which, being long-lived and producing small broods, are called “K-strategists” as opposed to the “r-strategists” who are short lived and produce bunches of offspring at once (for an evolutionary/ecological explanation of why these two strategies supposedly evolve, go here.)
Laysan albatrosses usually start breeding no earlier than the age of five, so Wisdom could be even older than that. Here, in a video from last year, is the matriarch in all her glory:
She doesn’t look a day over 30, does she?
Wisdom even has her own Wikipedia page, which says this:
Wisdom hatched in or around 1951. In 1956, at the estimated age of five, she was tagged by scientists at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge for study, but then returned to the wild rather than being kept in captivity. The person to attach the first tag was Chandler Robbins, a now retired senior scientist at the United States Geological Survey. Birds are banded so that they can be studied, including their locations, flight patterns, longevity, and a myriad of other data that can be collected.
On December 3, 2014, Wisdom made headlines when she laid an egg at the Midway Atoll. Her mate had arrived at the atoll on November 19 and Wisdom was first spotted by the refuge staff November 22. The egg was estimated to be number 36 for Wisdom over her lifetime. [JAC: she’s lost about five or six of her eggs, including one last year, with an estimate number of 30 successful offspring.] Albatrosses lay one egg per year and have monogamous mates for life. Out of the last nine years, Wisdom has laid an egg for eight of them. Smithsonian has speculated that since Wisdom is so unusually old for her species, she may have had to find another mate to keep breeding.
The USGS have tracked Wisdom since she was tagged, and they have logged that Wisdom has flown over three million miles since 1956. To accommodate her increasing longevity, the USGS has replaced her tag a total of six times.
click
Bait and switch?
Haven’t you got r- and k- straegists backwards there?
Even Homer nodded.
Yes, PCC(E) nodded. I SAID I couldn’t brain today, but you’re right and I’ve fixed it.
Also, your clickbait title left out the word “shocking”.
No, “awesome”.
I like “5 things you must know…”.
I’m more partial to: “5 things about seahorses that they do not want you to know.”
Yes! That is it!
How about: “5 things about seahorses that they do not want you to know and you were ashamed to even ask.”
There’s also the variant headline where they say “… and the result is frightening”. Not sure it applies here.
You’ve got r and K-strategies the wrong way round:
r = live fast, die young and have lots of throw-away kids
K = take your time and invest in a small number of offspring
I don’t know a think about bird reproductive biology, but does the age of the longer-lived birds impact the rate of chromosomal anomalies in broods?
In reading about chickens from a random Internet site, I see that no new ova are formed after a pullet chick hatches…
random site: http://articles.extension.org/pages/65372/avian-reproductive-systemfemale
Do birds with lifespans longer or shorter than chickens also hatch with all their ova?
Wondering as a chicken lives longer than a robin but nowhere near as long as an albatross.
Hope she gets a few cards and flowers come Mother’s Day!
Long reproductively active lifespans are the reasons some of the birds worst hit by DDT have made huge comebacks. DDT tended to affect fish eating birds the most as DDT accumulated in fish fat. Local brown pelican and osprey populations declined.
Old pairs of osprey that hadn’t raised a chick in over a decade of trying eventually worked enough DDT out of their bodies that they could begin raising viable young again. After that, populations bounced back fast.
I am not sure that this best explains the recovery. Many species of bird of prey were affected by DDT and most have recovered well (except in cases where other pressures such as persecution or habitat loss have depressed populations). This includes small species, such as the Eurasian Sparrowhawk Accipiter nivalis, with relatively short average life spans. The main reason for the recovery is the reduction in the quantity of DDT in the environment.
A k-selected species such as the Laysan Albatross would not be expected to bounce back quickly from a DDT type crisis because its long life span is accompanied by a slow rate of reproduction – one chick per year at most and each chick requiring five years or more before it starts to reproduce itself – so numbers can only rebuild slowly once the cause of the problem has been removed. Songbirds on the other hand live for only a short time but often produce large numbers of chicks per brood and may raise more than one brood per year. This enables them to show astonishingly rapid population growth after a crash (e.g. after a bad winter).
Most birds of prey lie somewhere between the Albatross and the songbird ends of the spectrum with eagles and other large raptors tending to be nearer the albatross end.
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,(laying some eggs)
Who could ask for more.
For a minute there I thought you were quoting from “Sex Farm”:
Workin’ on a sex farm
Tryin’ to raise some hard love
Gettin’ out my pitch fork
Pokin’ your hay
Scratchin’ in your hen house
Sniffin’ at your feedbag
Slippin’ out your back door
Leavin’ my spray
etc.
Ha! That’s hilarious. I was just quoting from the Beatles song.
Pity that Wisdom did not lay her egg on the Isle of Wight.
In this case the description “tough old bird” seems eminently fair!
Hope they’re more successful at it than Catholics (the mating-for-life part; the one-offspring-per-year part we called “Irish twins” on me Mam’s side of the family).
Sub
Plastic surgeons hate her!
Ha ha!
So how old can these birds be, plus the fact that they continue to reproduce until they die.
One Albatross says to the other – I was talking to my great, great, great, great, great, oh forget it, grandpa the other day.
If this Albatross was just a few years older, she would have seen WWII out there on Midway.
Very famous battle around there.
“When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?…”
Imagine carrying another irksome egg with you every year! You’d never really know what it meant to be light.
And yet she’s kept her chick-ish figure!
We enjoyed seeing Laysan Albatross at Kaena Point on the island of Oahu six years ago. http://druthersndragons.com/druthersndragons/Photos-Laysan_Albatross.html
So she’s about ready to make her nest at a condo in Florida?
How can she still be so beautiful at that age? I remember when I was 64…
“Birds are banded so that they can be studied, including their locations, flight patterns, longevity, and a myriad of other data that can be collected”.
A simple technique that has revealed huge amounts of information about the biology of birds. Recent advances in technology such as satellite tags (available in increasingly small sizes, enabling smaller and smaller species to be tagged) have added exciting new potential to what can be learned about the biology of these wonderful creatures.
She looks fit for a few more years yet.
She probability can make a mean nest.