Critically Endangered
Tristan Albatross
Diomedea dabbenena
The Tristan albatross is a large seabird from the albatross family.
Appearance
It is 110 cm (43 in) from beak to tail and has a wingspan of up to 3.05 m (10.0 ft). The Tristan albatross also never attains the full white plumage of the snowy albatross, and its bill is about 25 mm (0.98 in) shorter.
Range and habitat
Due to the difficulty in distinguishing them from snowy albatrosses, their distribution at sea is still not fully known, but the use of satellite tracking has shown that they forage widely in the South Atlantic, with males foraging west of the breeding islands towards South America and females to the east towards Africa. Tristan albatrosses are endemic to the islands of the Tristan da Cunha group and more specifically Gough Island. The majority of the world's population nest on Gough Island, around 1500 pairs.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
Even so, this resulted in the population of mice, Mus musculus, increasing to the point where they would eat and kill albatross chicks en masse. Today the main threat to the species is believed to be long-line fishing and these mice. Recent counts suggest that the population on Gough has decreased by 28% over 46 years, whereas population modelling predicts annual decline rates of 2.9–5.3%.
More recent modelling, conducted over three generations since 1980, suggests a decline equivalent to a >96% reduction in population size over three generations, since declines began. Formerly classified as an endangered species by the IUCN, it was suspected to be more threatened than generally assumed and undergoing a marked decline.
Tristan Albatross is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Tristan Albatross, Wikidata item Q1419906. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
