Least ConcernSouthern Giant Petrel
Macronectes giganteus
11 countries24 parks
Species group · Birds
WAnimals has 6 species of petrel, spread across 2 families (Pelecanoididae, Procellariidae).
Each one has its own full profile. This group does not replace them: it brings them together.
1 species in this group is in a threatened category according to the IUCN.
Recorded in 17 countries. The ones with the most species in the group:
A scavenger at penguin and seal colonies; its wingspan reaches 2 m.
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It eats both carrion and live prey, other seabirds' chicks included, and behaves more like a predator than most of its petrel relatives.
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It is the only seabird of the Southern Ocean able to open the skin of a dead seal by itself: its hooked, massive bill gives it access to a resource no other species can exploit unaided.
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Its black-and-white mottled back is so distinctive that no other seabird in the southern hemisphere resembles it, and 19th-century whalers called it the Cape pigeon.
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It feeds by swimming and filtering: it takes in surface water and forces it out again, holding back the krill with the lamellae of its bill, a method more like a duck's than a petrel's.
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It breeds hundreds of kilometres inland in Antarctica, on nunataks protruding from the ice cap, and makes round trips to the sea of more than six hundred kilometres to feed a single chick.
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Deposits of its stomach oil, hardened over time, build up beside its nests for millennia, and scientists use them to reconstruct Antarctic climate history over the past 30,000 years.
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Ranges calculated from the profiles that record the figure, not from all 6.
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The Svarthamaren colony, deep in the Antarctic interior, holds more than 200,000 pairs 200 kilometres from the nearest sea: the adults make round trips of more than four hundred kilometres to bring food to a single chick.
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