Your Gossip about Albatross Divorce, Illustrated.
Readers respond to heat wave rises in seabird divorce rates, part one.
Last spring, I asked folks from my email list and Instagram what they thought about a bunch of different animal relationships, social structures, and sex lives.
Let’s just say you got in the animal gossip game, and you did not disappoint.
I’ve been slowly illustrating your anonymously-divulged bean-spilling brilliance ever since, and I’m going to be sharing drips of it over the next month. Here’s part one of your seabird pillow talk.
The survey can be found here if you didn't get a chance to share your views and still want to participate. But don’t chitter all your chat in one place: more surveys are coming soon!
The question in question today: Albatross engage in elaborate, multi-year-long courtship rituals. They can live to be in their seventies. They reunite once a year, or once every few years, to produce one energy-intensive egg that they take turns roosting. Their divorce rate typically hovers around 3%. They probably spend quality time together 9-10 days a year. Scientists studying black-browed albatross in the Falkland Islands over thirty years have found that when the ocean surface temperature is especially warm in some years, female albatross initiate divorce, likely from heat stress, regardless of whether she and her partner have successfully produced chicks in the past. What do you make of their love lives, and this uptick in "divorce"?
Here’s what some of you had to say:
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