The aim of the Albatross project is to study applications and programming environments for computational grids consisting of multiple clusters that are connected by wide-area networks. Parallel processing on such systems is useful but challenging, given the large differences in latency and bandwidth between LANs and WANs. We provide efficient algorithms and programming environments that exploit...

Interactions among close relatives are expected to be common in colonially breeding species, species with limited geographic distributions such as island endemics, or those with limited natal or breeding dispersal. The waved albatross, Phoebastria irrorata, a colonially nesting, endemic seabird in Galápagos, Ecuador, presents an opportunity to closely examine relationships between genetic simil...

Laysan Albatross undergo repeated 2-3 week fasts throughout incubation, during which they can drop 25% of their body mass. In some species, during short, unpredictable fasts, glucocorticoid stress hormones (corticosterone in birds: CORT) rise as body mass declines. However, it is not clear whether the relationship between CORT and body mass holds during long-term, predictable fasting. Given tha...

Bycatch in longline fisheries threatens the viability of some seabird populations. The Hawaii longline swordfish fishery reduced seabird captures by an order of magnitude primarily through mitigating bycatch during setting. Now, 75% of captures occur during hauling. We fit observer data to a generalized additive regression model with mixed effects to determine the significance of the effect of ...

The impacts of climate change on marine species are often compounded by other stressors that make direct attribution and prediction difficult. Shy albatrosses (Thalassarche cauta) breeding on Albatross Island, Tasmania, show an unusually restricted foraging range, allowing easier discrimination between the influence of non-climate stressors (fisheries bycatch) and environmental variation. Local...

1. Dispersal is a fundamental but still poorly known process in population dynamics and several hypotheses have been proposed to explain its patterns. We studied natal and breeding dispersal and survival in a long-lived seabird, the wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans L.), and examined several hypotheses concerning dispersal patterns in birds. 2. We applied multi-state capture-recapture model...

Dioxins including 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) induce various toxic effects through the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) signaling pathway. Here, we investigated the structural and functional characteristics and molecular evolution of multiple AhRs in black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) and common cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo). We report the complementary DNA sequences ...

Most of the familiar garden birds we see all the time have a very short life: just a few years for the commoner species. But some birds have the potential for a very long life and a new study has looked at chromosomal status that may be linked with longevity. A team of international scientists headed by Pat Monahan at the University of Glasgow report, in Proceedings B of the Royal Society (publ...

Methylmercury cycling in the Pacific Ocean has garnered significant attention in recent years, especially with regard to rising mercury emissions from Asia. Uncertainty exists concerning whether increases in anthropogenic emissions over time may have caused increased mercury bioaccumulation in the biota. To address this, we measured total mercury and, for a subset of samples, methylmercury (the...

Recent literature has reported inaccuracies associated with some popular home range estimators such as kernel density estimation, especially when applied to point patterns of complex shapes. This study explores the use of characteristic hull polygons (CHPs) as a new method of home range estimation. CHPs are special bounding polygons created in GIS that can have concave edges, be composed of dis...