Through The Albatross Project's Web site, students can plot the paths of the birds against surface water temperature maps of the ocean and maps showing chlorophyll concentrations -- found to be a factor in where the birds feed during Anderson's pilot satellite tracking studies of another albatross species in the Galapagos Islands in 1995.
They can also learn about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's work on Tern, read researchers' field notes, post questions to the scientists and even use a program on the site to calculate the energy cost to birds to fly with the 30-gram transmitters taped to their backs. They can also use the program to design a bird that could fly even faster and farther than the real thing.
Sievert, the postdoctoral student at the University of Massachusetts who is placing the transmitters on the birds in Anderson's study, arrived on Tern on Jan. 9 and began testing dummy transmitters on the Laysan and black-footed albatrosses before identifying the first 12 for tracking after their chicks hatched. He said that a special adhesive tape holds the transmitters in place. The transmitters are taped between the wings in the center of the seabirds' backs to avoid disrupting their balance.
Sievert said that the transmitters could send data for as long as five or six months until their batteries run out.
Anderson said that much of what is know about where the Hawaiian albatrosses find food in the North Pacific has come from boat-based observations. But boats are too
slow to follow the birds as they fly, and airplanes are too fast and have to be ref
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Contact: Wayne Thompson
thompsow@wfu.edu
910-758-4393
Wake Forest University
5-Jan-1998