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Early form of "Seabird"

Seabirds are birds that spend much of their lives, outside the breeding season at least, at sea. Whilst the seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exibit striking convergent evolution as the same environmental problems have resulted in similar adaptions.

• Seabirds are birds that have adapted to life within the marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent evolution, as the same environmental problems and feeding niches have resulted in similar adaptations. The first seabirds evolved in the Cretaceous period, and modern seabird families emerged in the Paleogene.

Some seabird species, such as the albatrosses and petrels are truly pelagic, breeding on sea cliffs and small islands, and wintering on the open ocean. They are totally dependent on the sea for food. Many of these deep ocean species can barely walk on land. Other species such as the auks are equally dependent on cliff-ledge breeding sites and marine prey, but tend to be more coastal once they have migrated from their breeding stacks.

• Seabirds live longer, breed later and have fewer young than other birds do, but they invest a great deal of time in their young. Most species nest in colonies, which can vary in size from a few dozen birds to millions. They are famous for undertaking long annual migrations, crossing the equator or circumnavigating the Earth in some cases. They feed both at the ocean's surface and below it, and even feed on each other. Seabirds can be highly pelagic, coastal, or in some cases spend a part of the year away from the sea entirely.

Some of the less oceanic species, like grebes and divers, breed in freshwater environments but move to the coasts in winter. A few, such as the Great Crested Grebe and the Anhinga, will also winter on freshwater lakes where they remain unfrozen.

• Seabirds and humans have a long history together: they have provided food to hunters, guided fishermen to fishing stocks and led sailors to land. Many species are currently threatened by human activities, and conservation efforts are underway.

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1 Characteristics of seabirds

1.1 Life-history

1.2 Seabird colonies

2 Seabird families

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Characteristics of seabirds

Life-history

Seabirds life-histories are dramatically different from land birds. In general they live much longer (anywhere between 20 and 60 years), they delay breeding longer (for up to 10 years), and invest more effort into fewer young. Most species will only have one clutch a year, unless they lose the first (with the exception of the Cassin's Auklet), and many species (like the tubenoses and sulids), only one egg a year. There is also a long period of care for the young, extending for as long as six months, among the longest for birds. For example, once Common Guillemot chicks fledge they remain with the male parent for several months at sea. This life-history stratergy has probably evolved both in response to the challanges of living at sea and the relative lack of predation compared to that of land living birds.

Seabird colonies

95% of seabirds (not including the grebes and loons) are colonial, and seabird colonies are amongst the largest in the world, and provide on of Earth's great wildlife spectacles. Colonies of over a million birds have been recorded, both in the tropics (such as Kiritimati in the Pacific) and in the polar lattitudes (as found in Antartica). Seabird colonies occur exclusively for the purpose of breeding, non-breeding birds will only collect together outside of the breeding season in areas where prey species are densely aggragated.

Seabird families

There exists no one defenition of which groups are seabirds, however conventionally the penguins, tubenoses, Pelecaniformes, skuas, gulls, terns, skimmers and skimmers are. Loons and grebes are also included by most scientists. Sometimes the phalaropes are included in the seabirds, since although they are waders ("shorebirds" in North America), two of the three species are oceanic outside the breeding season. Although there are a number of sea ducks in the family Anatidae which are truly marine, by convention they are usually excluded from the seabird grouping.

Featured article form of "Seabird"

Seabirds are birds that have adapted to life within the marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent evolution, as the same environmental problems and feeding niches have resulted in similar adaptations. The first seabirds evolved in the Cretaceous period, and modern seabird families emerged in the Paleogene.

Seabirds live longer, breed later and have fewer young than other birds do, but they invest a great deal of time in their young. Most species nest in colonies, which can vary in size from a few dozen birds to millions. They are famous for undertaking long annual migrations, crossing the equator or circumnavigating the Earth in some cases. They feed both at the ocean's surface and below it, and even feed on each other. Seabirds can be highly pelagic, coastal, or in some cases spend a part of the year away from the sea entirely.

Seabirds and humans have a long history together: they have provided food to hunters, guided fishermen to fishing stocks and led sailors to land. Many species are currently threatened by human activities, and conservation efforts are underway.

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• The information in the first version is true: the grammatical style in the second version is more consistent with a more authoritative biological tone, yet still easy to read style of writing.

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1 Classification of species as seabirds

2 Evolution and fossil record

3 Characteristics

3.1 Adaptations to life at sea

3.2 Diet and feeding

3.2.1 Surface feeding

3.2.2 Pursuit diving

3.2.3 Plunge diving

End of section

3.2.4 Kleptoparasitism, scavenging and predation

3.3 Life history

3.4 Breeding and colonies

3.5 Migration

3.6 Away from the sea

4 Relationship with humans

4.1 Seabirds and fisheries

4.2 Exploitation

4.3 Other threats

4.4 Conservation

4.5 Role in culture

5 Seabird families

6 References

7 External links

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1. Classification of species as seabirds

There exists no single definition of which groups, families, and species are seabirds, and most definitions are in some way arbitrary. In the words of two seabird scientists, "The one common characteristic that all seabirds share is that they feed in saltwater; but, as seems to be true with any statement in biology, some do not." However, by convention all of the penguins and Procellariiformes, all of the Pelecaniformes except the darters, and some of the Charadriiformes (the skuas, gulls, terns, auks and skimmers) are classified as seabirds. The phalaropes are usually included as well, since although they are waders ("shorebirds" in North America), two of the three species are oceanic for nine months of the year, crossing the equator to feed pelagically.

Loons and grebes, which nest on lakes but winter at sea, are usually categorised as water birds, not seabirds. Although there are a number of sea ducks in the family Anatidae which are truly marine in the winter, by convention they are usually excluded from the seabird grouping. Many waders (or shorebirds) and herons are also highly marine, living on the sea's edge (coast), but are also not treated as seabirds.

2. Evolution and fossil record

Seabirds, by virtue of living in a geologically depositional environment (that is, in the sea where sediments are readily laid down), are well represented in the fossil record. They are first known to occur in the Cretaceous Period, the earliest being the Hesperornithiformes, like Hesperornis regalis, a flightless loon-like seabird that dove in a fashion similar to grebes and loons (using its feet to move underwater) but had a beak filled with sharp teeth.

While Hesperornis is not thought to have left descendants, the earliest extant seabirds also occurred in the Cretaceous, with a species called Tytthostonyx glauconiticus, which has been placed in the Procellariiformes. In the Paleogene the seas were dominated by early Procellariidae, giant penguins and two extinct families, the Pelagornithidae and the Plotopteridae (a group of large seabirds that looked like the penguins). Modern genera began their wide radiation in the Miocene, although the genus Puffinus (which includes today's Manx Shearwater and Sooty Shearwater) dates back to the Oligocene. The highest diversity of seabirds apparently existed during the Late Miocene and the Pliocene. At the end of the latter, the oceanic food web had undergone a period of upheaval due to extinction of considerable numbers of marine species; subsequently, the spread of marine mammals seems to have prevented seabirds from reaching their erstwhile diversity.

3. Characteristics

Adaptations to life at sea

Seabirds have made numerous adaptations to living on and feeding in the sea. Wing morphology has been shaped by the niche an individual species or family has evolved, so that looking at a wing's shape and loading can tell a scientist about its life feeding behaviour. Longer wings and low wing loading are typical of more pelagic species, whilst diving species have shorter wings. Species such as the Wandering Albatross, which forage over huge areas of sea, have a reduced capacity for powered flight and are dependent on a type of gliding called dynamic soaring (where the wind deflected by waves provides lift) as well as slope soaring. Seabirds also almost always have webbed feet, to aid movement on the surface as well as assisting diving in some species. The Procellariiformes are unusual amongst birds in having a strong sense of smell, which is used to find widely distributed food in a vast ocean, and possibly to locate their colonies.

Salt glands are used by seabirds to deal with the salt they ingest by drinking and feeding (particularly on crustaceans), and to help them osmoregulate. The excretions from these glands (which are positioned in the head of the birds, emerging from the nasal cavity) are almost pure sodium chloride.

With the exception of the cormorants and some terns, and in common with most other birds, all seabirds have waterproof plumage. However, compared to land birds, they have far more feathers protecting their bodies. This dense plumage is better able to protect the bird from getting wet, and cold is kept out by a dense layer of down feathers. The cormorants possess a layer of unique feathers that retain a smaller layer of air (compared to other diving birds) but otherwise soak up water. This allows them to swim without fighting the buoyancy that retaining air in the feathers causes, yet retain enough air to prevent the bird losing excessive heat through contact with water.

The plumage of most seabirds is less colourful than that of land birds, restricted in the main to variations of black, white or grey. A few species sport colourful plumes (such as the tropicbirds or some penguins), but most of the colour in seabirds appears in the bills and legs. The plumage of seabirds is thought in many cases to be for camouflage, both defensive (the colour of US Navy battleships is the same as that of Antarctic Prions, and in both cases it reduces visibility at sea) and aggressive (the white underside possessed by many seabirds helps hide them from prey below).

Diet and feeding

Seabirds evolved to exploit different food resources in the world's seas and oceans, and to a great extent, their physiology and behaviour have been shaped by their diet. These evolutionary forces have often caused species in different families and even orders to evolve similar strategies and adaptations to the same problems, leading to remarkable convergent evolution, such as that between auks and penguins. There are four basic feeding strategies, or ecological guilds, for feeding at sea: surface feeding, pursuit diving, plunge diving, and predation of higher vertebrates; within these guilds there are multiple variations on the theme.

Surface feeding

Many seabirds feed on the ocean's surface, as the action of marine currents often concentrates food such as krill, fish, squid or other prey items within reach of a dipped head.

Surface feeding itself can be broken up into two different approaches, surface feeding while flying (for example as practiced by gadfly petrels, frigatebirds and storm-petrels), and surface feeding whilst swimming (examples of which are practiced by fulmars, gulls, many of the shearwaters and gadfly petrels). Surface feeders in flight include some of the most acrobatic of seabirds, which either snatch morsels from the water (as do frigate-birds and some terns), or "walk", pattering and hovering on the water's surface, as some of the storm-petrels do. Many of these do not ever land in the water, and some, such as the frigatebirds, have difficulty getting airborne again should they do so. Another seabird family that does not land while feeding is the skimmer, which has a unique fishing method: flying along the surface with the lower mandible in the water—this shuts automatically when the bill touches something in the water. The skimmer's bill reflects its unusual lifestyle, with the lower mandible uniquely being longer than the upper one.

Surface feeders that swim often have unique bills as well, adapted for their specific prey. Prions have special bills with filters called lamellae to filter out plankton from mouthfuls of water, and many albatrosses and petrels have hooked bills to snatch fast-moving prey. Gulls have more generalised bills that reflect their more opportunistic lifestyle.

Pursuit diving

Pursuit diving exerts greater pressures (both evolutionary and physiological) on seabirds, but the reward is a greater area in which to feed than is available to surface feeders. Propulsion underwater can be provided by wings (as used by penguins, auks, diving petrels, and some other species of petrel) or feet (as used by cormorants, grebes, loons and several types of fish-eating ducks). Wing-propelled divers are generally faster than foot-propelled divers. In both cases, the use of wings or feet for diving has limited their utility in other situations: loons and grebes walk with extreme difficulty (if at all), penguins cannot fly, and auks have sacrificed flight efficiency in favour of underwater diving. For example, the razorbill (an Atlantic auk) requires 64% more energy to fly than a petrel of equivalent size. Many shearwaters are intermediate between the two, having longer wings than typical wing-propelled divers but heavier wing loadings than the other surface-feeding procellariids, leaving them capable of diving to considerable depths while still being efficient long-distance travellers. The most impressive diving exhibited by shearwaters is found in the Short-tailed Shearwater, which has been recorded diving below 70 m.[16] Some albatross species are also capable of some limited diving, with Light-mantled Sooty Albatrosses holding the record at 12 m. Of all the wing-propelled pursuit divers, the most efficient in the air are the albatrosses, and it is no coincidence that they are the poorest divers. This is the dominant guild in polar and subpolar environments, as it is energetically inefficient in warmer waters. With their poor flying ability, many wing-propelled pursuit divers are more limited in their foraging range than other guilds, especially during the breeding season when hungry chicks need regular feeding.

Plunge diving

Gannets, boobies, tropicbirds, some terns and Brown Pelicans all engage in plunge diving, taking fast moving prey by diving into the water from flight. Plunge diving allows birds to use the energy from the momentum of the dive to combat natural buoyancy (caused by air trapped in plumage), and thus uses less energy than the dedicated pursuit divers, allowing them utilise more widely distributed food resources, for example, in impoverished tropical seas. In general, this is the most specialised method of hunting employed by seabirds; other non-specialists (such as gulls and skuas) may employ it but do so with less skill and from lower heights. In Brown Pelicans the skills of plunge diving take several years to fully develop—once mature, they can dive from 20 m (70 ft) above the water's surface, shifting the body before impact to avoid injury. It has been suggested that plunge divers are restricted in their hunting grounds to clear waters that afford a view of their prey from the air, and while they are the dominant guild in the tropics, the link between plunge diving and water clarity is inconclusive. Some plunge divers (as well as some surface feeders) are dependent on dolphins and tuna to push shoaling fish up towards the surface.

End of this section of Seabird article

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