Michelle Kappes, at UC Santa Cruz Long Marine Lab. As part of my PhD project at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I’m looking to see how efficient Hawaiian albatross parents are at feeding their chicks. We estimate how much energy Laysan and black-footed albatross adults use up during a trip to sea to find food. And then we measure how much food energy they deliver to their chicks when they return from sea. That’s where the bucket comes in. (Here's the photo that Frans Lanting took of me holding the chick in a basket. Other photos by Lanting can be found in this month's National Geographic Magazine story: On the Wings of the Albatross.)

When our study bird heads to sea, we weigh its chick every five hours from dawn until dusk…in the chick bucket. Then we weigh the chick after its parent returns to feed it. To find out how much food the parent brought back from its trip to sea, we collect a sample from the chick to find out how many calories were in the food. We then replace the food we took by giving the chick a mixture of squid and Pedialyte, used to replace fluid in human babies and children. This allows us to estimate how well the parents provide for their chicks. We’ll also be able to see if there are differences between species. Because Laysan and black-footed albatrosses prefer different feeding grounds, we expect that their strategies for obtaining food might be different, too.
The adult Laysan and black-footed albatrosses in this study are also equipped with satellite tags, so that we can relate how they behave at sea to the energy they use up to find food. We also equip the study bird with a plastic leg band holding a temperature recorder, which allows us to determine when the albatross is in flight or on the surface of the ocean. That allows us to investigate the patterns in where albatrosses fly to find food, how active they are while they hunt for food, how much energy they use up while finding food, and how efficient they are at providing for their chicks.

Because we’ve been able to track albatrosses for several years, we know that where they go to find food changes from year to year. So, the information we learn from this study can help us figure out if changes in their feeding strategies may change how much energy they use up to search and grab that food. This will provide some insight into how future changes in their environment may affect them.