Southern giant petrel
Macronectes giganteus
— Where the name comes from
Macronectes is “great swimmer”, from makrós and nēktēs; giganteus insists. Petrel comes instead from Saint Peter, who walked on water: sailors gave that name to the birds that patted the waves with their feet as they flew. In the southern seas the whalers called this one the stinker, for the same reason as the fulmar.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Tubenoses
- Habitat
- The Southern Ocean; nests on subantarctic islands and Antarctic coasts
- Range
- Southern seas, from Antarctica to South America and South Africa
- Size
- 86–99 cm, wingspan 185–205 cm, 3.8–5.5 kg
- Diet
- Carcasses of seals and penguins, fish, squid, fishery discards
- Lifespan
- 30 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the only tubenose that habitually feeds on land, at carcasses.
- 02
It dominates the other scavengers: it drives even the skuas off a carcass.
- 03
It drinks seawater and excretes the salt from two glands above the eyes.
— What sets it apart
Males and females feed in two different places, and that divides their fates too. The males, larger, dominate the seal carcasses on the beaches; the females, smaller, feed out at sea — where the longlines are, the hooks strung over kilometres that catch tuna and take seabirds by accident. The result is that in populations hit by industrial fishing it is mainly the females that die, and the colonies tilt until they are almost entirely male: a species can be brought to crisis by a mortality that touches only half its members.
