Albatrosses often have to fly hundreds of miles in just a few days in order to find their prey, and scientists have long wondered how the birds navigate over a largely featureless ocean. Previous studies suggested the birds might use a combination of scent and vision to guide them, but until now, no one had been able to directly record the behavior of the foraging seabirds.
To track the birds, scientists attached lipstick-sized digital cameras, equipped with depth and temperature sensors, to the backs of four albatrosses from Bird Island off the coast of South Georgia in the Antarctic Ocean. After three foraging trips, the bird-borne cameras had captured more than 28,725 images. Although many photos were too dark to be useful — and 6,600 were obscured by feathers fluttering in front of the camera lens — the remaining images yielded a startling result.
“One surprising finding was that one of the study birds encountered a killer whale, Ornicus orca, during the course of the trip,” wrote the researchers in a paper published this week in the journal PLoS ONE. “This image showed that the killer whale broke the surface and that three other albatrosses were also apparently following the whale.”
