PARIS —
Most albatrosses mate for life but shy males who avoid confrontation are more
likely to get dumped, researchers said Wednesday, adding it was the first time
personality had been shown to predict divorce in a
wild animal.
اضافة اعلان
Wandering
albatrosses, which traverse the
Southern Hemisphere and have the largest wingspan
of any bird at more than 3m, are among the most monogamous animals.
They can live for
more than 50 years, and while they spend much of that time on the wing, they
meet up every two years with the same partner to breed.
Divorce is a “super
rare event”, occurring around 13 percent of the time, Ruijiao Sun, the lead
author of a new study published in the journal Biology Letters, told AFP.
But “if they find
that their breeding success is too low with a specific partner they may look
for another one,” said the PhD student at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
in the US.
To find out how an
individual bird’s personality affects their likeliness of getting divorced, the
researchers drew on a unique database.
Since 1959,
scientists have been tracking a colony of wandering albatrosses on Possession
Island, in the southern Indian Ocean’s Crozet archipelago.
“We put a stainless
ring on the leg with a number,” marine biologist and study co-author Stephanie
Jenouvrier told AFP.
“Because they’re
not really scared we can approach very slowly and we can read the number,” she
added, saying it allowed the team to “reconstruct the entire history of these
birds”.
Sun said the birds
“breed every two years because they take a whole year to rear their chick and
it’s super energy-consuming, so they take a one-year sabbatical after to
recover and they do not spend that time together”.
Shy guys finish last
Over more than a decade, the researchers measured the boldness of nearly
2,000 birds by observing how they respond to a human approaching their nest.
They found that
shyer male albatrosses were up to twice as likely to get divorced than their
bolder rivals — but no difference was found in females.
“We show for the
first time the link between personality and divorce in a wild species, thanks
to probably the best dataset in the world,” Sun said.
Wandering
albatrosses have “elaborate courtship processes”, the study said, as the birds
raise up their wings, squawk and generally dance around.
Sometimes during
the process, a pushy outsider male couple tries to cut in. That is when the
shyer males avoid confrontation — and accept divorce.
However there are
other factors affecting divorce rates, the researchers said.
There are more male
than female albatrosses, because females tend to forage in areas where they are
more likely to get caught up in fishing lines.
The surplus of
males means that females quickly find a new mate, but it can take males more
than four years, the study found.
Also, “individuals
that are in a long-term relationship are less likely to divorce than the ones
that are new to each other,” Jenouvrier said.
Last year research indicated that climate change could also
be driving albatrosses to divorce, as the birds have to travel farther to find
decreasing numbers of fish.
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