Food Web

The Royal Albatross/toroa are at the top of their food chain.  It is the 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 were threatened then the squid would over populate the food web.  The size of the Royal Albatross means that 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.

Adaptions

The Royal Albatross is a giant bird with a wing span of over three metres wide. There colouring of the Royal Albatross is black edges to their upper mandible, which sets them apart from adults of the closely related albatross. Royal albatross have black flecks on their upper-parts. The royal albatross glides through the air peacefully but its huge size makes them very clumsy on land.

 

The 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.

 

Royal Albatross 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 and when there are not they are out collecting food.

 

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 them move around in the water.

 

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

Community

The Royal Albatross/Toroa only breeds in New Zealand waters. They are both in the Northern and Southern islands of New Zealand. The Northen species nest on the Chatam Islands. Where do they nest in the South Island? They are on the Taiaroa Head on the Otago Peninsulia. 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 they only come back to the land when they are going to hatche 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 to nice sunny days on the land. It can get very windy at times because of the Ocean being right there next to there Island.

 

 

 

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 foodsource 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 dont have alot of enemeis because they mostly live on the Ocean but when they come back to land to have there babys one thing that really harms them is Stoats which really likes to eat there eggs. The biggest thing that harms them on the Ocean is fishing companys because they try to get there feed but get tangled up in nets.