ACAP Latest News

 Jon Plissner on Midway Atoll with Laysan Albtrosses

“Join [the Friends of Midway Atoll] for our live webinar, Beyond the Nest: the Science and Future of Albatrosses, featuring Dr. Jon Plissner, former Supervisory Biologist at Kuaihelani (Midway Atoll), who spent nine years working on the island.  Discover the fascinating history of Midway's albatrosses, decades of research, population trends, conservation challenges, and the remarkable story of Wisdom, the world's oldest known wild bird.

Special Guest: Biologist and photographer Dan Rapp will join us live from Midway.  Both guests will answer your questions during a live Q&A.”

Dr. Jon Plissner, Former Midway Atoll Supervisory Biologist

Dr. Plissner retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in April 2026 after nine years on Midway Atoll, beginning as a six-month volunteer and ultimately serving as the refuge’s Supervisory Biologist. A career ornithologist specializing in bird movements and population dynamics, he has worked on research projects across the U.S., from Alaska to Hawaiʻi.  Now retired in Maine, Dr. Plissner continues to support Midway’s biological programmes and volunteers with the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory.  He plans to return to Midway this winter to assist with the beginning of the albatross breeding season.

Dan Rapp, Seabird Biologist & Photographer

Dan Rapp, biologist and photographer

Dan is a seabird biologist with extensive experience working across Hawaiʻi, Alaska, and Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. He earned his graduate degree from Hawaiʻi Pacific University, where his research focused on plastic ingestion in seabirds at Lalo (French Frigate Shoals). Dan became a full-time resident of Kuaihelani (Midway Atoll) during the Seabird Protection Project and has since contributed to numerous conservation and research projects throughout the monument.

Sunday, 08 November 2026, 10h00 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (GMT-10).

A recording of the presentation will be sent to those who register.

John Cooper, Emeritus Information Officer, Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, 19 October 2026

 A Predator Free Conference, with the theme “Removing invasives. Restoring nature” is planned to be held in Wellington, New Zealand over 1-3 February 2028.  The conference will be hosted by the Predator Free New Zealand Trust and held in the Tākina Wellington Convention and Exhibition Centre.

“In 2028, we’ll host the first-ever Predator Free Conference, bringing together the people, ideas, science, technology and stories driving this work in New Zealand and internationally.  Aotearoa New Zealand has set itself one of the boldest conservation goals on the planet: to remove introduced predators from an entire country by 2050.  This conference brings the people instrumental in driving that goal into one room, to share and celebrate what has been achieved in the last 10 years, what we've learned, how tools and technology have evolved and how we are bringing the community along with us.  The conference [will deliver] practical insight, hands-on demonstrations and real conversations built specifically for people working in predator eradication and ecological restoration.”

Register to receive more news of the planned conference here.

With thanks to David Lewis, Predator Free New Zealand Trust.

John Cooper, Emeritus Information Officer, Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, 16 October 2026

A Wandering Albatross pair on Macquarie Island, photograph by Melanie Wells

Natasha Gillies (School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, UK) and colleagues have published open access in the Journal of Animal Ecology on the influence of parental coordination on breeding success of Black-browed Thalassarche melanophris and Wandering Diomedea exulans Albatrosses.

The paper’s abstract follows:

1  Understanding how animals acquire resources and allocate them to reproduction is fundamental for identifying the factors shaping fitness. In species with biparental care, both the amount each parent invests and how well their efforts are coordinated can influence reproductive success. Yet the benefits of coordination are unlikely to be universal and instead may depend strongly on species' ecology and environmental context. Despite this, many studies still focus on one parent in isolation, overlooking the potential importance of joint investment strategies.

2  Here, we examined how parental effort and coordination, measured here as the relative investment of both parents, influenced breeding success in black-browed Thalassarche melanophris and wandering albatrosses Diomedea exulans across colonies characterised by differing levels of environmental variability.

3  We found that the influence of parental coordination on breeding success differed between species, breeding stages, and sites. Longer foraging trips improved annual breeding success during incubation for black-browed albatrosses, whereas the effect of longer trips during brooding varied between sites subject to differing environmental variability.

4  Similarity in the predictability and duration of partners' foraging trips was associated with higher breeding success at sites with higher environmental stability in both species but had little effect where conditions were more variable. This suggests that patterns of reproductive investment may differ according to environmental context, potentially reflecting a shift toward individual flexibility in more unpredictable conditions.

5  Our findings underscore the importance of considering both parents' contributions when linking reproductive strategies to breeding outcomes and highlight how observed differences in breeding success across colonies may reflect shifts in the trade-offs between self-maintenance and offspring investment within varying environmental contexts.”

Reference:

Gillies, N., Phillips, R.A., Weimerskirch, H., Potts, J.R., Réale, D., Wilson, A.J., Angelier, F., Barbraud, C., Bennison, A., Delord, K., Lemesle, P., Peroteau, S., Wood, A.G., Xavier, J.C., & Patrick, S.C. 2026.   Contrasting associations between parental coordination and breeding success in albatrosses across differing environmental contexts.  Journal of Animal Ecology 00, 1–16.

John Cooper, Emeritus Information Officer, Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, 15 October 2026

Foraging track of an adult Wandering Albatross from Possession Island during incubation, overlaid with vessel-interaction locations derived from bird-borne radar measurements in the inset (from the publication)

Ewen Le Scornec (Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé, La Rochelle Université, Villiers-en-Bois, France) and colleagues have published open access in the journal Scientific Reports on the use of radar mounted on Wandering Albatrosses Diomedea exulans to monitor toothfish and tuna longliners in the Southern Ocean.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“Fisheries have major ecological impacts including bycatch of foraging seabirds, but it is often difficult to obtain comprehensive information on the presence of fishing vessels.  Automatic Identification System (AIS) data can be used to monitor fisheries and their interactions with GPS-tracked seabirds, but not all vessels have their AIS operational.  Bird-tied radar detectors can overcome this limit and complement monitoring, but the technology is recent and costly.  We used both methods combined as a training dataset for classification algorithms, to extend the identification of interactions to GPS tracks without radar detectors nor AIS. We studied over 3 years wandering albatrosses from the French Southern Territories, interacting with toothfish and tuna longliners.  We used 196 GPS tracks combined with radar detectors, to calculate different movement variables over various scales (time spent in an area, sinuosity, speed) and used a Random Forest to distinguish behaviour in presence or absence of fishing vessels. Our model reached high classification accuracy (ca. 85%) for individual birds included in the training dataset. However, we lost predictive power (around 72% of accuracy, with a drop of specificity from 76 to 59%) when predicting on individuals not included in the training dataset. Our results emphasize the importance of documenting and accounting for individual variations to use animals as sentinels. We discuss the pros and cons of different research avenues (data sampling, classification model, bird species, etc.) to eventually get to predict fisheries from bird movements only.”

Reference:

Le Scornec, E., Chimienti, M., Corbeau, A., Pajot, A., Weimerskirch, H. & Collet, J. 2025.  Predicting fisheries from albatross movements requires accounting for individual variability in interaction.  Scientific Reports 15, 32807.

John Cooper, Emeritus Information Officer, Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, 14 October 2026