Scott Taylor: Picture a low ring of sand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about as far from any continent as you can get. The wind never really stops. Hundreds of thousands of birds nest here, and one of them has been coming back to this exact spot for longer than most people have been alive. I start every spring that I teach ornithology by introducing my students to Wisdom. Not the abstract noun or the idea of being wise, but a bird, a very special bird. Wisdom is a Laysan albatross. She was banded in 1956 as a breeding adult on Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of three islands northwest of Hawaii that happens to host the largest albatross colony on the planet, which makes her the oldest banded wild bird we know of, at least 75 years of age. 75 years. She's the same age as my dad. Of course, not all birds live as long as an albatross. Some do, like macaws and cockatoos and condors and even flamingos. But most do not. The chickadees I study live fast by comparison, and so do many of the passerines that visit our bird feeders. That difference matters more than it might seem because it changes what it takes to study them. With a short-lived bird, a few years of fieldwork can tell you a great deal about a population. With a bird like Wisdom, a few years tells you almost nothing.

Scott Taylor: In 1956, Chandler Robbins knelt down on Midway, fit a band around the leg of a full-grown bird, and wrote down that number. He started a data set he would never see the end of because Wisdom outlived him. Chandler passed away March 20th, 2017. She's outlived other people who've tracked her across the decades since, and she's still out there, still returning to the same atoll, still laying eggs. The bird has outlasted the scientists. That's not a footnote. That's the whole problem. How do you study an animal that will outlive you, your funding, maybe even the field station you work from? You can't just be patient. You have to build something that survives you. A study handed from one researcher to the next like a baton across careers and borders and generations. So the bird is never the only one who remembers. And when that watching stops, we don't just lose the next data point. We lose the answers to questions we haven't even thought to ask yet. Which brings us to the topic of today's episode. Okay, but does age bring wisdom? To help us unpack that, I'm joined by Dr. Etienne Rouby, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research here at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies long-lived seabirds, including the wandering albatross. After the break, Etienne walks us through what it actually takes to study a bird across decades and generations of researchers. We get into what those long-term datasets reveal that a short study never could. And we talk about what we stand to lose when the watching stops. Stay tuned.

Scott Taylor: Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. I'm excited to have Etienne here today to talk all about albatross. Thanks for joining us.

Etienne Rouby: Hello, Scott. Thank you very much for having me. And hello, everyone.

Scott Taylor: Of course. Yeah. So I thought we could start with Wisdom. Wisdom is this albatross I love. I tell my ornithology students about her every year. She was banded in 1956, so 70 years ago, and she's still laying eggs. How does a research project that long even survive?

Etienne Rouby: Well, I would say that the first thing that is very important is to have a vision. People that are pioneers into this type of study and have the vision for a program that will last long because it matters. And so then you need to have these people also to find the funding and the associate funding and effort from the countries to help sustain such an effort.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, definitely. So for these long-lived birds like albatross, what can 50 or 70 year long-term data sets really tell us about them?

Etienne Rouby: I'm not sure how familiar are your audience with the concept of capture-mark-recapture.

Scott Taylor: Oh yeah, tell us about it.

Etienne Rouby: Scientists and also people from the like voluntary people, participative scientists. So even people in the audience can actually participate in this kind of effort. They go on the field. And they capture a bird and they put a band, if it's a chick or an adult, and then it's different anyway. And then every year or every two to three to five years, in the population, in the environment, etc. And by doing so, then you are able, if you follow also the nests, for example, to know which individual paired with which other one, if they stay together, like albatrosses are mostly monogamous, but recent studies that my team conducted show that it's a bit more complicated. But You can tell which chick belongs to which age olds, etc. And so a very long-term following and data set, the first thing it allows you to quantify is how well the population is doing overall. Because it's, as you say, species that live maybe 60, sometimes 70 years old individuals. And trying to assess if the animals are doing well on a window of like three to five years It's impossible. You need to follow them through their entire life history to know how much they reproduced and also link that to human pressure or environmental covariates.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, yeah. So for these longer term birds, longer living birds, we could see that, oh, there's hundreds of them here right now. But if they have not reproduced for seven years in a row, for example, there's going to be a consequence for that that we don't see coming until it hits. Okay, so if you lined up a hummingbird, a crow, an eagle, and an albatross, who wins the longevity contest and is it even close? Let's paint a picture for our audience.

Etienne Rouby: The extreme on the longest longevity is going to be the albatross, like with roughly 45 plus, 60, sometimes 70. A hummingbird will be the fastest lifespan with three to five years. From what I remember, I think that crow is like 15 to 17, and eagle is 20 to 30, something like that. So they will be mostly in the middle. But yeah, it's also to show maybe the birth that you also discussed, I think they may be a bit lower now.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, chickadees, the average lifespan of a chickadee is really two to three years. But then some of them can live 10 plus years. And the ones that live the longest, it turns out from my colleagues Vladimir's work, are the ones that have the best spatial memory, which is this thing we study in chickadees. Nice. Yeah, it's interesting. There's usually this pattern in smaller birds where many small birds die young. So if you plotted it, it would be this peak at like two to three years where they're dying. But then there's this long tail of some individuals living longer and then various reasons for that. But certainly albatross take the cake in terms of wild birds and how long we know they live. I guess another long-lived group of birds are the parrots, which, you know, macaws can live forever. Probably as long as albatross, although who knows whether they would live that long in the wild necessarily, but they certainly live, you know, 70 plus years in captivity, which is really impressive. You study the wandering albatross, this iconic species. Tell us about them. Describe them.

Etienne Rouby: So the wandering albatross is the biggest of all albatross species. I cannot tell you how many species of albatrosses there is on Earth.

Scott Taylor: That's up for debate anyways.

Etienne Rouby: Yeah, exactly. That's the good answer to give. But there's a lot. They all share some common characteristics because... They belong to the same path. So they tend to be like a torpedo shape, kind of, especially when they fly. And they're very, very big wingspan. So for wandering, 3.5 meters of wingspan to 4.

Scott Taylor: And it's about 11.5 to 12 to 13 feet. Wingspan. So from wingtip to wingtip. That's, yeah, that's incredible.

Etienne Rouby: Yeah, that's big. And they tend to be seven kilos. So, and for their size, when they are on their two feet, for people wandering, roughly to the waist, the top of the head, I would say. Approximately, yeah. So, no, they're very big birds.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, they're very impressive birds. What do they build their nests out of?

Etienne Rouby: So the nest is built off of wood and grass and a bit of dirt. In the black-browed albatross, they build it mainly using dirt And on the colony we follow, sometimes the birds, they will use some nests that are already built from the previous year.

Scott Taylor: Can you walk us through what long-term albatross research looks like on the ground? So what are you measuring? How often are you measuring it?

Etienne Rouby: I work mainly with the French territories. So we have some islands. You have Crozet, Kerguelen. Also St. Paul, Amsterdam, which are in the Southern Ocean. And so these islands are very difficult to access. I work mainly with the wandering albatross, which is the biggest one. Then I work a bit on the black-browed albatross. It's a bit different for people. They can look, he has a very nice eyelash.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, they have beautiful makeup on their faces.

Etienne Rouby: Even the beak has the red lipstick.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, exactly.

Etienne Rouby: And then the Amsterdam albatross also.

Scott Taylor: Albatross are huge birds. You know, so they're a handful, I'm sure.

Etienne Rouby: So the chicks, usually you measure when you can. The part of the chicks or the tarsus. The beak, the wingspan also, etc. You weight them also. And for example, some chicks at the end of the breeding season, they might be 14 kilograms. I don't know in pounds how much is it.

Scott Taylor: I always forget the conversion too. We're too coming from France and Canada. I know at 14 kilograms, that's a heavy chick.

Etienne Rouby: Yeah, that's heavy. But then they lose the weight because otherwise they can't fly. The Idris, they are like seven, something like that.

Scott Taylor: Okay. 14 kilograms is 31 pounds. And those chicks, so they're 31 pounds and then they drop the weight eventually and then they can fly, which is just... And so you said an adult albatross is 7 kilograms. So...

Etienne Rouby: Yeah, so males are bigger than females. I think they weight around. It always depends a bit, but like seven kilograms, the females a bit less. But something that is very fascinating with the chicks is that they are fed by the adult. They gain weight. Then the adult leaves the nest and the chick has no food anymore. So he starts to lose the weight and then he fledges. And for five years, at least, they don't come back on land. They spend five years at sea.

Scott Taylor: That's amazing.

Etienne Rouby: The first five years of their lives, they spend totally at sea. They sleep on the ocean, etc. That's crazy. We don't know what they actually do very much during these five years.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, they just like cruise around the Southern Ocean and eventually five years later, show back up on the island they hatched on. And on another episode, we talked about sense of smell and the fact that many birds, all birds we've measured have a sense of smell, but seabirds are one of like the... the pinnacles of that using their sense of smell to navigate these kind of featureless Southern Oceans and make it back to their breeding colonies, which is just incredible. These birds do live a really long time. So even a 50 or 70 year data set, the ones that started in the data set are still alive in the data set. What kinds of things are you seeing about albatross populations, specifically these wandering albatross, whether, you know, aging or survival, those sorts of things?

Etienne Rouby: So one thing that we showed very recently this year is that the population of wandering albatross, before the 1985s, it has been very heavily subjected to bycatch. So bycatch is when, for example, you have a fishing boat. They want to catch, I would say, Antarctic toothfish or Chilean sea bass, for example, or another species. But because you put some hooks with some bait, then you have the birds come and they die because they are caught in the fishing line. So it's a bycatch. It's an incidental capture. So from the 70s to the 1985s, you see a drop in the population. The number of breeding pairs, it's usually how it's measured, the abundance of the population, because it's the actual number of effective animals, the one who contribute to the reproduction of the population, kind of. And so you see decline from like 500 breeding pairs, roughly 1,000 individuals, to like 200 breeding pairs. The breeding colony of Crozet.

Scott Taylor: Okay, on Crozet.

Etienne Rouby: Of the wandering.

Scott Taylor: Yeah.

Etienne Rouby: And so it declined a lot until 1985. And then you have some regulation that took over. To adapt the fishing lines, etc. Mitigation measures. And the population, you see, it's slightly recovering. Now it's back to what it was. So, good.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, that's great. I didn't know that.

Etienne Rouby: And what we showed recently is that The age at first reproduction, which is a measure of when an animal first reproduces, which is a very sensible measure because it will determine then the output of how many babies you will produce in the population, the population growth rate. So if it's going up, if it's going down, etc. It's a very sensible metric. And we showed that it diminished over the same period. And then stabilized. So stabilization is mainly physiological, but you are the response also of this age at first reproduction. And we think that it's because the number of birds actually decreasing, you open some space for the ones that are still here or that are recruiting, and they can recruit younger birds. And it's a good mechanism because they can recruit younger. So then they can participate to recreate a good abundance at the end.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, so they can then breed longer if they start a little bit earlier. How much was that difference? What was the age at first reproduction prior to this decline versus now? Is it a number of years or just a year or part of a year or what?

Etienne Rouby: Years. It was like 10 to 11 for males and around 9 for females. And now it's more like 9 for males and 7 for females.

Scott Taylor: Okay, so like multiple years. Yeah, yeah. That's... That's pretty cool. I mean, it's interesting to think about why a bird would delay reproduction so long. And in this case, maybe it's just because there wasn't room on the colony until you were like, you know, a certain age to establish your own spot. That's very cool. So an unfortunate reality is that long-term studies are some of the first things to get cut when funding titans. And walk us through what we lose scientifically and for conservation when a 60-year data set just stops being collected, for example.

Etienne Rouby: One of the obvious answers for me is that It's going to sound weird, but we don't know what we lose.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, exactly.

Etienne Rouby: We just shoot ourselves a bullet in the foot. You know, we cut every path to progress. It's like saying no to an investment that compounds every year, every study. Because the more you publish a study... It's exponential. I was surprised about that. Like all the questions that arise from one study, it's even more. And it's really an insight on life and on everything that is so important to keep. So this is the first thing we lose is that I think we don't know. And this is why we should keep it alive. Because then some very good stuff could emerge. And then the second thing that we lose, I think, is the connection to nature. Because saying no to long-term monitorings can be oceanographic monitoring. We saw recently that they cut also oceanographic, bottom oceanographic monitoring. They wanted to cut also NCAR at Boulder, the meteorological stuff, etc. And so it tells about the volunteer of the society. It's like we are so away from nature that we stop monitoring it, but it doesn't work like that.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, we're still going to experience the consequences of changing weather systems or long-term warming or more variable, yeah, climate. Yeah, I like the you just don't know what you are missing piece of it. And, you know, we get asked sometimes with our long-term chickadee study, like, why are you doing it as a long-term study? And it's the exact same thing. Like, well, the longer we study them, the more we will learn. And we really don't know what questions we might be able to ask with a few more years of data. And the other piece is like for monitoring long-term trends, you need... Yeah, like you just need many, many years of data before you can tell if anything's changing or quantify those changes. There's a funny piece in the long-term temperature records that we have at the Mountain Research Station where if we'd started monitoring in the early 1980s, like 81 or 82, there was a large volcanic eruption that lowered global earth temperatures considerably. Like you can see it in the record. So if you started in that year, you would have... thought something crazy happened in the subsequent five years because the temperatures went back up to normal. You know, if you miss those pieces of a record or you start monitoring and have only a short term time, then you don't know actually what's going on. So there's... Yeah, lots of importance to these long-term data sets. And it is unfortunate that a lot of them are at risk right now for various reasons. You had this paper come out this year showing that populations are, they're increasing or have increased, that age at first reproduction has declined. So these wandering albatross are breeding earlier than they used to. What's the next thing you're looking into with these long-term data sets? What's the next exciting question to you?

Etienne Rouby: So we have some GPS loggers that were put on the birds. And I quantify how their behavior during the breeding season, especially the foraging behavior, impact their demographic rates. So the breeding success, the survival to the next year, etc. And I observe very, very cool patterns. In differences of survival in between the males and the females, notably.

Scott Taylor: Okay. Are they foraging in different places and that's leading to different survival? Yeah. So tell us about that. Yeah.

Etienne Rouby: Yeah. So the females, they tend, so for people wandering, so you have Madagascar and you have on the, in between Madagascar and Australia you have the archipelago, roughly. And so, the females, they tend to forage in the Indian Ocean most, and in Madagascar a bit like on the east part. And the males, they tend to forage more towards Antarctica. Yeah.

Scott Taylor: Oh, interesting.

Etienne Rouby: Because the males are bigger, so they can use stronger winds. And so they tend to go in different places. So this was already shown. But what I show now in this study is that, and in the study we published also this, like last month, etc., they use some atmospheric systems and it impacts their demographic rates. But here what we show now is that the years associated with a good survival for the females tends to be the year associated with a low survival for the males because you have this difference in atmospheric systems. When the rings are better up, the females beneficiate from it. And when they are more down, it's the opposite.

Scott Taylor: Interesting.

Etienne Rouby: So this is the very next one. And then the one that also I'm working on right now, it's very new. It tends to be something more done in ecology right now. It's the quantification of the potential for evolution and adaptation in these long-life species based on a phenotype. And so this is what I'm working on right now. And they can fly very long. They do dynamic sorrows. Ring so they don't flap their wings when they fly. They surf the wind and the wave. They use, you have papers on that, on the physics of how they use the wind and the wave. And in fact, they go on the opposite of a wave. And because you have a differential in between the speed of the wind and of the air on the surface of the wave, they use it to climb and to go down and they really surf the ocean without any energy.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, it's amazing to watch. Having seen albatross in the Southern Oceans, yeah, their soaring and their gliding ability is just impressive. And they don't have to flap at all. I mean, their wings, you can't really flap them very easily because of the aspect ratio. They're for gliding. They're not for flapping. Yeah. Very cool birds. Man, I guess in your population, how frequently are they reproducing? Like one chick a year, one chick every two years?

Etienne Rouby: So if they're good, it's one chick every two years.

Scott Taylor: Okay, that's like the best scenario is one chick every two years.

Etienne Rouby: So the weight is very important. And because they put so much effort, so much energy into going at sea, catching food, giving to the baby again, during four to five months, sustaining themselves, etc., they tend to lose some weight. And so they need an entire year, at least, to recover from that.

Scott Taylor: To recoup,

Etienne Rouby: Yeah. It's a lot of investment for babies. And so after that, they can reproduce again. But so in the population, we see Also, you have what we call the successful breeders, individuals that are able to successfully breed at the end of the breeding season. So, fledge a chick. Failed breeders, it can fail at the egg stage or chick stage or even before performation, etc. And so you observe birds that are very good, like they were successful. We call sabbatical year, sabbatical, successful, sabbatical, etc. And birds that are very bad, it's like fail, sabbatical, fail, sabbatical, dead. Stuff like that, you know.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, yeah. And there it's just like they're not... accumulating enough energy to have, to lay that single egg. And yeah, for wandering albatross, it's just one chick, right?

Etienne Rouby: Yeah.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, so one chick every two years is the best case scenario for a wandering albatross. And for many, it's less than that. I think that's kind of insane to think about in the context of our chickens that we've, you know, they're laying an egg a day for us to consume or most birds, you know, in a given, well, not most birds, but there's kind of two strategies. Either you have just a single or a couple of chicks every few years, or you have many, many chicks every year, but then birds that do that don't live very long. And if you average out across their lifestyles, they reproduce about the same number of individuals, but across very different timescales. Yeah. Different strategies. So for you as the scientist who studies these long-lived birds, if a bird born today won't reproduce until you're middle-aged and won't die until you're retired, how do you build a conservation plan around that?

Etienne Rouby: Yeah, and that's a very good point that you show here. Because it's also, I did not start any of this program. It's actually some people that started before. I still work with them, but now they start to get into retirement. But you can see the legacy of, for example, people they had to supervise, etc. So you have this first. You have all the collaborations with the countries. Which makes it so in current times where every country tends to be a bit more into its border, etc. Science is actually a safe place for countries to collaborate.

Scott Taylor: Yeah.

Etienne Rouby: You know, you see in meetings also where I am involved in Antarctica, etc. You see China, Russia, US sometimes, etc. Discussing. Also, it can be a bit heated. But because it's a safe ground, it's a place where you negotiate stuff that is a bit sweet, I would say, nature, science, etc.

Scott Taylor: For some of these creatures, one of the things I think, like, for the ones that live really long, and there's organisms like the Greenland shark, which can, we know for sure, live 272 years, maybe even 300 plus years. We're just like... that's too long of a time to really understand everything about a creature, especially if a single individual is spanning multiple centuries. So that's certainly some place I think we're missing information.

Etienne Rouby: And it's not necessarily a long-term data set that can tell you that. But it's because you study the animals long enough that you can start to understand them a bit. And be like, okay, now I know... What happens when, for example, the wind changes? Ah, it impacts the population. Ah, I put the GPS. Ah, I see that the animal is behaving differently, etc. So all these cues. And then you're like, so maybe they are actually thinking of what they are doing, etc.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, science has trained us to think about animals often passively experiencing their environment and being shaped by it. But yeah, there's a lot of, I think there's already a lot of evidence in many cases that they're much more aware. But the more evidence we have in the context of, yeah, like albatross and decision making, that's a cool thing to ponder for sure. So we've reached the part of the show we call That's B.S. Or That's Bird Stuff, where we give our guests an opportunity to debunk a myth that ruffles their feathers. So Etienne, what do you want to call BS on?

Etienne Rouby: I would call BS on the fact that every people who study birds is a bird person.

Scott Taylor: All right. So you were not?

Etienne Rouby: No. To be honest, at first, so me, I'm more of a marine mammal person, I would say. You know, you have clans in ecology. And so I was like, oh man, I hate birds. They are sneaky. I don't want to study them, etc. But then I started to look at them, you know, and to not judge them for what they are, you know, a dinosaur with feathers and stuff. And yeah, I actually like them, but I'm not a birder.

Scott Taylor: Not a birder. Well, in private, many of our other guests have acknowledged that though they study birds, they're also not birders. So you're in good company there, but that's pretty funny. Yeah, they are a weird group of organisms. Well, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. I've really appreciated your time, hearing more about your research. And yeah, thanks for taking the time.

Etienne Rouby: Thank you very much, Scott. If people are interested into some, I don't know, inquiries, questions, etc., they can always go to my website or find my email. And yeah, and then, yeah, thank you very much for having me.

Scott Taylor: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Birds are dinosaurs, and around here we like our snacks, so we end each episode with a dinosaur nugget. Today's nugget is, the wandering albatross nearly disappeared because of long-line fishing, and we only know that they've bounced back because someone kept watching for decades. These birds raise one chick every two years at best, and spend the first five years of life without ever touching land. The only reason we understand any of this is because long-term studies kept going, handed from one generation of scientists to the next, long enough to actually see the story unfold. Okay. So what happens when funding gets short-sighted? We go blind. We stop seeing the trends that take decades to reveal themselves, and we lose the answers to questions we haven't even thought to ask yet. Science isn't a one-time purchase. It's an investment that only pays off if we keep making it year after year, long after the people who started the study have moved on.

Scott Taylor: That's a wrap on this week's episode. Okay, but does age bring wisdom? If you liked it, follow the show, leave us a review, and share it with someone who'd love it too. It genuinely helps. We'll catch you next time. Byeee.

This transcript was generated using AI-assisted transcription and may contain errors or omissions. Please refer to the audio or video episode for the most accurate representation.