Fulmars, squid and annelids

The important place of cephalopods in the diet of the petrels, and the possibility that they may catch them at night, first appears to have been reported by John MacGillivray (1846) following a visit to St Kilda off the Outer Hebrides (W Scotland) in June-July 1840, and subsequent voyage around the world in HMS Fly in 1842-46 (Ralph 1993), as follows (bird nomenclature revised): “Food of the Petrel Family. In the stomachs of individuals of the Fulmar Petrel (Fulmarus glacialis), dissected by me at St Kilda several years ago, I invariably found numbers of the homy mandibles of the Lepiadae. Since then I have examined others of the family, and generally with the same result. I allude particularly to the Cape Petrel (Daption capense), two species of Albatross (Diomedea exulans and D. melanophris), and a Puffinus from the ME coast of Australia. From this, it is probable that the Cuttle fish family, which swarm in the Southern Seas, approach the surface chiefly at night, when the various oceanic birds above alluded to, are no less active than during the day, for marked individuals have been known to follow a ship for thousands of miles in her course across the trackless ocean.” Similarly, in September 1924 Hagerup (1926) also found that 50 Fulmars killed at 64°N in the Davis Strait all contained squid beaks, possibly from Gonatus fabricii, the food of Bottle-nosed Whales Hyperoodon ampullatus (Gray 1942). It has since been confirmed by Grieg (1933) and Lydersen et al. (1989) that Fulmars feed upon this squid around Svalbard. During surveys of seabird diet around Scotland and Ireland in 1970-75, the stomachs of 26 out of 36 Fulmars examined (72%) held cephalopod beaks, identified as mainly Gonatus fabricii (Bourne 1982, 1986). Since recent surveys of regurgitations fed by Fulmars to their chicks have seldom detected squid (Furness & Todd 1984, Camphuysen & Van Franeker 1996), possibly because only the durable mouthparts are found in the stomach (Camphuysen & Van Franeker 1997), and past reports of Fulmars feeding on these squid have been overlooked (Furness 1994, Croxall & Prince 1996), it may be useful to give details of our records of Fulmars taking squid and annelids.