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The historically monogamous albatrosses are flying awaying from their partners due to stress caused by climate change on their environments and survival, according to a study by New Zealand’s Royal Society published last week.
Monogamous birds are more likely to divorce following ‘breeding failures’: “Divorce is often an adaptive behavioural mechanism driven by the ‘win–stay, lose–switch' information gathering process, in which measures of previous breeding performance inform the decision of an individual to re-mate with their old partner (stay) or find a new one (switch),” the study’s authors write.
“The probability of divorce was directly affected by the environment, increasing in years with warm sea surface temperature anomalies,” the authors write.
The divorce rate average of 3.7 percent over the span of 15 years, rose to 7.7 percent in 2017, with warming oceans.
“It’s pretty obvious they love each other… After you’ve been watching albatrosses for 30, 40 years, you can kind of spot it. They do all this stuff that we think’s important — human emotion stuff, you know — greeting the long-lost mate, and they love each other, and they’re going to have a baby. It’s wonderful,” Graeme Elliott, an albatross expert at New Zealand’s Department of Conservation told New York Times.
Despite successful relationships, warmer sea temperatures increased the probability of a switching of mates.