Monday, 16 February 2026

What do albatrosses get up to when we can't see them?

     

The behaviour of some animals is easy to study, you just watch them. But what about animals like albatrosses that spend most of their lives beyond the horizon? We know where they do it, through GPS trackers, but not what they do. Recent research by Aline da Silva Cerqueira at King's College, London, and reported on the King's Global Affairs website might shed some light on this - or rather, not light, sound.

 

Fitting audio recorders to albatrosses allows you to listen in to their lives. They are quite large birds, the two species studied, Thalassarche melanophris, Diomedea exulans, have wingspans of 2.4m and 3.7m respectively, so plenty of carrying capacity (and the devices are much, much smaller than the image above!). And when you get the recordings behaviours can be assigned by what you hear;

 

Flight by flapping sounds, or wind rushing over wings during gliding

Vocalisations such as calls produced by the tagged bird, conspecifics or even other species

Preening characterised by repetitive tapping, scratching, or rubbing noises

On-water activity including splashing, paddling, or water displacement.

 

Of course, the birds might be doing more than one thing at a time, and it takes some experience to interpret what is actually going on. Which brings a further problem, there was a lot of audio! 436 hours worth. Too much, realistically, for researchers to listen to in real time, but they don't need to - this is exactly the sort of thing computers are good at. A Convolutional Neural Network was created in Google Colab and trained using a manually labelled seabird audio dataset. It was then verified by comparison of other data with human assessment, proving accurate over 95% of the time.

 

So what are albatrosses doing? That is the next step! But combined with GPS, environmental data and tools like accelerometers which can tell if a bird is flapping or gliding (Maywar et al, 2025), albatrosses will soon give up their secrets.

 

 

References

 

da Silva Cerqueira, A. , Freeman, R., Phillips, R.A., Terence P. Dawson, T.P. (2025) Automated classification of albatross acoustic behaviour at sea: A free and open-source classifier for seabird sounds. Ecological Informatics 92 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2025.103474

 

Maywar IJ, Phillips RA, Orben RA, Conners MG, Shaffer SA, Thorne LH. (2025). Differential impacts of wind and waves on albatross flight performance in two ocean basins. Mov Ecol., 14(1),1. doi: 10.1186/s40462-025-00614-w.

 

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