Abstract
The light-mantled sooty albatross is a medium-sized albatross with a circumpolar distribution in the Southern Ocean. The known breeding sites are restricted to Islands in sub-Antarctic latitudes close to the Antarctic convergence between 46° and 53°S. In the austral summer season 2008/2009 we discovered a new breeding colony with at least two confirmed and three probable nests at Fildes Peninsula, King George Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica (62°12′S, 59°01′W). The new breeding colony of light-mantled sooty albatross described here represents the southernmost breeding place of any albatross species ever recorded.
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to M. Finkelstein and an anonymous referee for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. S. Lisovski and H.-U. Peter were partially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (pe 454/1ff); V. Pavel and K. Weidinger were supported by grants from the Ministry of Education (MSM 6198959212) and Ministry of Environment (VaV SP II 1a9/23/07) of the Czech Republic.
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Lisovski, S., Pavel, V., Weidinger, K. et al. First breeding record of the light-mantled sooty albatross (Phoebetria palpebrata) for the maritime Antarctic. Polar Biol 32, 1811–1813 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-009-0705-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-009-0705-3