Wandering albatross exert high take-off effort in weak wind with low wave conditions

The relationship between the environment and the small-scaled behavior of marine animals is not fully understood. This is largely due to the difficulty in obtaining environmental datasets with a high spatiotemporal precision. The problem is particularly pertinent in assessing the influence of environmental factors in rapid high energy consuming behavior such as seabirds take-off. Here, to fill the gaps in existing database, we employed novel techniques using animal-borne sensors with motion records to estimate parameters on wind and ocean waves, and evaluated their influence on wandering albatrosses take-off. The measurement revealed that the wind speed and the wave height that the wandering albatrosses experienced during take-off ranged from 0.7 ~ 15.4 m/s and 1.6 ~ 6.4 m, respectively. The four indices that were measured (flapping number, frequency, running speed, and duration on the sea surface) also varied with the environmental conditions (i.e., flapping number varied from 0 to over 20). Importantly, taking-off was easier under higher wave condition in the constant wind speed, and take-off effort increased only when both wind and waves were gentle. Our data suggests that both ocean waves and winds play important roles in albatross take-off, and advances our current understanding of albatross flight mechanisms. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.