Food Webs

 The Royal Albatross/ Toroa are at the top of its food chain.  It is a very dominant bird mainly due to the size of it and how it spends half of its life at sea. Even though plankton is at the bottom of the web without them the Royal Albatross would die out because if you take out anything from the food web it will kill all of the animals involved. An example of this is if you take out fish from the Albatross’s food web above the plankton would overgrow and the Royal Albatross will die out.

If the Royal Albatross/ Toroa was threatened then the squid would over populate. Because with the size of a Royal Albatross they need to eat a lot, so that makes the population stay the same. If the squid over populate that would the mean they need more big fish and they will run out then the squid will die out. Once the bigger fish are gone that would make the smaller fish over populate. So over all the whole food web would be destroyed and all of that was left would be billions of overgrown plankton.
 

 

 

Community

The Royal Albatross/Toroa only breeds in New Zealand waters. They are both in the Northern and Southern islands of New Zealand. The Northern species nests on the Chatom Islands (top of New Zealand). Where do they nest in the South Island? They are on the Taiaroa Head on the Otago peninsula. The Royal Albatross range throughout the Southern Ocean and are mostly found in the New Zealand coastal waters during the winter.

 

The Royal Albatross lives in two places firstly they spend most of their time out in the ocean feeding and only come back to the land when they are going to hatch their eggs. The weather that they have to go through is a mixture of nice and bad weather from storms out in the ocean and nice sunny days on the land. They can get very windy at times because of being right next to the Ocean.

 

Although the Royal Albatross eat some fish and other marine creatures, there mane feed is squid that they pluck from the sea. But they have some competition for example the main competition is fishing companies and boats for example Long-line fishing, drift-netting and trawling is what gets them. Many albatrosses go for fishing vessels which gives them an easy food source and they will follow boats to feed on fish bait and discards. They may take the food without coming to any harm, but some get caught in fishing gear. But not a lot get caught.

 

Royal Albatross don’t have a lot of enemies because they mostly live on the Ocean but when they come back to land to have their babies, one thing that really harms them is stoats which really likes to eat their eggs. The biggest thing that harms them on the Ocean is fishing companies because they try to get there food but get tangled up in nets.

 

Info from

http://www.doc.govt.nz/documents/about-doc/concessions-and-permits/conservation-revealed/toroa-royal-albatross-lowres.pdf   

 

Adaptations

The Toroa or royal albatross is a graceful giant with a wing span of over three metres. They have a black cutting edge to their upper mandible, which sets them apart from adults of the closely related wandering albatross. Juvenile royal albatross have black flecks on their upper-parts. The royal albatross flies very gracefully but its huge size makes them very clumsy on land.

Royal albatross usually mate for life, despite long separations at sea. Recognised pairs return to the same nesting area each time they breed. When the chick has hatched, the parents take turns at guarding and feeding it for the first five or six weeks. Chicks are then left unguarded, except for feeding visits, until they fledge at about eight months. After a successful fledging, the parents will leave the colony and spend the following year at sea before returning to breed again

 

Toroa spend most of their lives at sea, returning to land only to breed and raise their young. They start breeding at around 6 to 10 years old, each pair raising one chick every two years.

 

Some of the important adaptations are the size of their legs and arrangement. They are spread apart and very skinny, they have large webbed feet. This is because the large webbed feet will help the Toroa when it’s moving around in the water.

 

I think these adaptions have come about over 100’s of years of not setting foot on land for long periods of time.




Info from

http://www.doc.govt.nz/documents/about-doc/concessions-and-permits/conservation-revealed/toroa-royal-albatross-lowres.pdf