The relationship between the environment and marine animal small-scale behavior 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 seabird take-off. To fill the gaps in the existing environmental datasets, we employed novel techniques using animal-borne sensors with motion records to estimate wind and ocean wave parameters and evaluated their influence on wandering albatross take-off patterns. Measurements revealed that wind speed and wave heights experienced by wandering albatrosses during take-off ranged from 0.7 ~ 15.4 m/s and 1.6 ~ 6.4 m, respectively. The four indices measured (flapping number, frequency, sea surface running speed, and duration) also varied with the environmental conditions (e.g., flapping number varied from 0 to over 20). Importantly, take-off was easier under higher wave conditions than under lower wave conditions at a 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 for albatross take-off and advances our current understanding of albatross flight mechanisms.

The recorders, Ninja-scan (Little Leonardo, Tokyo, Japan), record triaxial acceleration at a very high time resolution (100 Hz). Ninja-scan also records 3D GPS positions (5 Hz), Doppler velocity (5 Hz), temperature (6 Hz), pressure (6 Hz), geomagnetism (6 Hz), and angular velocity (100 Hz). There are two types of Ninja-scans with different battery masses (Naruoka et al., 2021). Small Ninja-scans weighed 28 g, which is 0.3 ~ 0.4% of wandering albatross body mass, and are expected to record for 7 h. Large Ninja-scans weighed 91 g, which corresponds to 0.8 ~ 1.3% of wandering albatross body mass, and are expected to record for 65 h.

Ninja scans were attached to breeding wandering albatrosses at Possession Island, Crozet archipelago (46°25 S, 51°44 E) in the South Indian Ocean in 2019 and 2020. In 2019, 12 small Ninja scans were attached (in tandem) to 6 individuals. On each bird, one recorder had a delay timer so that the two recording periods did not overlap. Additionally, 15 birds had individual Ninja-scans attached, of which 8 were small Ninja-scans and 7 were large Ninja scans. In 2020, 10 small Ninja-scans were attached in tandem to 5 individuals. Additionally, 19 birds had individual Ninja-scans attached, of which 7 were small Ninja-scans and 12 were large Ninja-scans. In summary, 21 and 24 wandering albatrosses were tagged in 2019 and 2020, respectively. All experiments were performed from late January to early March of each year, which corresponds to the incubation period of wandering albatrosses. Recorders were attached to the back of each bird with waterproof tape (Tesa, Hamburg, Germany) and glue (Loctite; Henkel, Dusseldorf, Germany). All recorders were retrieved within 35 days. One small Ninja-scan which had been attached in isolation in 2020 did not work correctly. The effects of the attached recorders on wandering albatrosses were previously assessed (Phillips et al., 2003; Barbraud and Weimerskirch, 2012) and revealed that small recorders (less than 3% of their body mass) do not negatively impact breeding or foraging behaviors. The experiment was conducted as part of Program 109 of the Institut Polaire Paul Emile Victor with permission from the Préfet des Terrs Australes et Antarctiques Françaises, France (permit numbers: 2018-117 and 2019-106).