Land-based monitoring reveals the first southernmost breeding pair of white-capped albatross on Diego Ramírez Islands, highlighting the archipelago as a global conservation hotspot.
Albatrosses are renowned for their high philopatry, which has been proposed as a major barrier to their dispersal and hybridization with other albatross species. Except for shy-type albatross species from New Zealand, examples of colonization of new breeding sites and interbreeding with closely related species are rare. During the austral summer of 2022, while conducting land-based monitoring of resident Black-browed ( Thalassarche melanophris ) and Grey-headed ( T. chrysostoma ) albatross populations on the Diego Ramírez Islands, Chile (56 S), we documented the first (and southernmost) breeding record of a nesting pair of White-capped Albatross ( T. steadi ), a species endemic to the Auckland Islands, New Zealand (~ 7000 km away). The species identity was confirmed through molecular analysis. This discovery underscores the importance of Diego Ramírez and its surrounding waters as a hotspot for global albatross conservation.
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Suazo et al. (2024) studied this question.
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