Behavioral datasets of wandering albatrosses collected at Possession Island, Crozet, France, in 2019 and 2020

The relationship between the environment and marine animal small-scale
behavior is not fully understood. This is largely due to the difficulty in
obtaining environmental datasets with a high spatiotemporal precision. The
problem is particularly pertinent in assessing the influence of
environmental factors in rapid, high-energy-consuming behavior such as
seabird take-off. To fill the gaps in the existing environmental datasets,
we employed novel techniques using animal-borne sensors with motion
records to estimate wind and ocean wave parameters and evaluated their
influence on wandering albatross take-off patterns. Measurements revealed
that wind speed and wave heights experienced by wandering albatrosses
during take-off ranged from 0.7 ~ 15.4 m/s and 1.6 ~ 6.4 m, respectively.
The four indices measured (flapping number, frequency, sea surface running
speed, and duration) also varied with the environmental conditions (e.g.,
flapping number varied from 0 to over 20). Importantly, take-off was
easier under higher wave conditions than under lower wave conditions at a
constant wind speed, and take-off effort increased only when both wind and
waves were gentle. Our data suggests that both ocean waves and winds play
important roles for albatross take-off and advances our current
understanding of albatross flight mechanisms.