Some northern royal albatrosses from the colony at Taiaroa Head at the tip of Otago Peninsula have recently been fitted with prototype GPS tracking devices that ‘text home’ to say where the birds have been.
The tracking devices use mobile phone networks to send GPS locations to a base station, and have been developed by Keith Payne and Tom Molteno in the Physics Department at the University of Otago (click here to listen to an earlier interview about this project).
They are being tested in the field by Zoology Department PhD student Junichi Sugishita, who is fitting different versions of the devices to juvenile and breeding albatrosses. Junichi is investigating where young albatross feed, with a view to understanding their interaction with fishing vessels, and finding out where breeding albatrosses feed and how much food they supply to their chick.
A few days after the tracking devices were fitted in February 2012, Alison Ballance spoke with Junichi Sugishita to find out the very first results from the juvenile tracking study.
