|
Magenta Petrel
The magenta petrel (''Pterodroma magentae''), or Chatham Island tāiko, is a small seabird in the gadfly petrel genus, ''Pterodroma''. Found exclusively on Chatham Island, New Zealand it is one of the rarest birds in the world, believed to be extinct for over 100 years before its rediscovery in the 1970s. Description This medium-sized petrel has a brownish-grey head, neck, and upper breast, with white underparts. The undersides of the wings are brown. It has a black bill and pink legs. Adults weigh 400–580 g. The bird nests in 1–3 m long burrows under dense forest. They form long-term monogamous pair bonds, raising one egg at a time, and both partners incubate the egg and feed the chick. The breeding season is between September and May, during which time the birds forage over the open ocean. History Fossil records and historic records show that tāiko used to be the most abundant burrowing seabird on Chatham Island, though has not been found to have lived on ot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Enrico Hillyer Giglioli
Enrico Hillyer Giglioli (13 June 1845 – 16 December 1909) was an Italians, Italian zoologist and anthropologist. Giglioli was born in London and first studied there. He obtained a degree in science at the University of Pisa in 1864 and started to teach zoology in Florence in 1869. Marine vertebrates, and invertebrates, were his academic interest but he was a noted amateur ornithologist and photographer. Giglioli was director of the Royal Zoological Museum in Florence, Italy. He wrote up the zoology of the voyage of the corvette on which he had taken over from Filippo de Filippi. Professor De Filippi died in Hong Kong in 1867. He was also involved in the activities of the Florence School of Anthropology and through this developed an interest in ethnography. In 1901, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. Whale sightings In 1870 he reported seeing a new species of whale (unofficially called Giglioli's Whale) off the coast of Chile long with two dor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tommaso Salvadori
Count Adelardo Tommaso Salvadori Paleotti (30 September 1835 – 9 October 1923) was an Italian zoologist and ornithologist. Biography Salvadori was born in Porto San Giorgio, son of Count Luigi Salvadori and Ethelyn Welby, who was English. His brother Giorgio married their cousin Adele Emiliani (daughter of Giacomo Emiliani and Casson Adelaide Welby) and had five children (Charlie, Robbie, Minnie, Nellie and Guglielmo "Willie"). His nephew Guglielmo Salvadori Paleotti married Giacinta Galletti de Cadilhac (daughter of Arturo Galletti de Cadilhac and Margaret Collier) and had three children (Gladys, Massimo "Max" and Gioconda Beatrice "Joyce"). He studied medicine in Pisa and Rome and graduated in medicine at the University of Pisa. He participated in Garibaldi's military expedition in Sicily (the Expedition of the Thousand), serving as a medical officer. He was assistant in the Museum of Zoology in 1863, becoming Vice-Director of the Royal Museum of Natural History in Tur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seabird
Seabirds (also known as marine birds) are birds that are adapted to life within the marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent evolution, as the same environmental problems and feeding niches have resulted in similar adaptations. The first seabirds evolved in the Cretaceous period, and modern seabird families emerged in the Paleogene. In general, seabirds live longer, breed later and have fewer young than other birds do, but they invest a great deal of time in their young. Most species nest in colonies, which can vary in size from a few dozen birds to millions. Many species are famous for undertaking long annual migrations, crossing the equator or circumnavigating the Earth in some cases. They feed both at the ocean's surface and below it, and even feed on each other. Seabirds can be highly pelagic, coastal, or in some cases spend a part of the year away from the sea entirely. Seabirds and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gadfly Petrel
The gadfly petrels or ''Pterodroma'' are a genus of about 35 species of petrels, part of the seabird order Procellariiformes. The gadfly petrels are named for their speedy weaving flight, as if evading gadflies (horseflies). The flight action is also reflected in the name ''Pterodroma'', from Ancient Greek ''pteron'', "wing" and ''dromos'', "runner". The short, sturdy bills of these medium to large petrels are adapted for soft prey that they pick from the ocean surface. They have twisted intestines for digesting marine animals that have unusual biochemistries. Their complex wing and face marking are probably for interspecific recognition. These birds nest in colonies on islands and are pelagic when not breeding. One white egg is laid usually in a burrow or on open ground. They are nocturnal at the breeding colonies. While generally wide-ranging, most ''Pterodroma'' species are confined to a single ocean basin (e.g. Atlantic), and vagrancy is not as common amongst the genus as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genus
Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family (taxonomy), family. In binomial nomenclature, the genus name forms the first part of the binomial species name for each species within the genus. :E.g. ''Panthera leo'' (lion) and ''Panthera onca'' (jaguar) are two species within the genus ''Panthera''. ''Panthera'' is a genus within the family Felidae. The composition of a genus is determined by taxonomy (biology), taxonomists. The standards for genus classification are not strictly codified, so different authorities often produce different classifications for genera. There are some general practices used, however, including the idea that a newly defined genus should fulfill these three criteria to be descriptively useful: # monophyly – all descendants ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chatham Island
Chatham Island ( ) (Moriori: ''Rēkohu'', 'Misty Sun'; mi, Wharekauri) is by far the largest island of the Chatham Islands group, in the south Pacific Ocean off the eastern coast of New Zealand's South Island. It is said to be "halfway between the equator and the pole, and right on the International Date Line", though the point (180°, 45°S) in fact lies ca. 173 miles WSW of the island's westernmost point. The island is called ''Rekohu'' ("misty skies") in Moriori, and ''Wharekauri'' in Māori.Government of New Zealand, Dept. of Conservation (1999) Chatham IslandsConservation Management Strategy''. Retrieved 13 July 2012. The island was named after the survey ship HMS ''Chatham'' which was the first European ship to locate the island in 1791. It covers an area of . Chatham Island lies south-east of Cape Turnagain, the nearest point of mainland New Zealand to the island. Geography The geography of the roughly T-shaped island is dominated by three features: two bays a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island country by area, covering . New Zealand is about east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The country's varied topography and sharp mountain peaks, including the Southern Alps, owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland. The islands of New Zealand were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans. Between about 1280 and 1350, Polynesians began to settle in the islands and then developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight and record New Zealand. In 1840, representatives of the United Kingdom and Māori chiefs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moriori
The Moriori are the native Polynesian people of the Chatham Islands (''Rēkohu'' in Moriori; ' in Māori), New Zealand. Moriori originated from Māori settlers from the New Zealand mainland around 1500 CE. This was near the time of the shift from the archaic to classic Māori culture on the main islands of New Zealand. Oral tradition records multiple waves of migration to the Chatham Islands, starting in the 16th century. Over several centuries these settlers' culture diverged from mainland Māori, developing a distinctive language (which started as a dialect but gradually became only partially mutually intelligible with Māori), mythology, artistic expression and way of life. Currently there are around 700 people who identify as Moriori, most of whom no longer live on the Chatham Islands. During the late 19th century some prominent anthropologists mistakenly proposed that Moriori were pre-Māori settlers of mainland New Zealand, and possibly Melanesian in origin. Ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tuku Nature Reserve
The Tuku Nature Reserve is a nature reserve on Chatham Island, New Zealand, in the Tuku-a-tamatea (Tuku) River Valley in the south-west of the island. The 1238 hectares of land, largely covered with dense native forest, are owned by the New Zealand government and is managed by its Department of Conservation. Before Crown ownership, the land was owned by Manuel and Evelyn Tuanui. The Tuanuis assisted ornithologist David Crockett in discovering the magenta petrel (''Pterodroma magentae''), or Chatham Island tāiko, on the land in 1978. This small burrow-nesting seabird had been considered extinct for over 100 years, and remains critically endangered. The Tuanuis donated the land that now forms the Reserve in 1983 for the conservation management of the tāiko, with adjacent land covenanted for the same purpose. The reserve is important for the conservation of the tāiko. As of 2004, 80% of tāiko breeding burrows are inside the reserve. Flora and fauna The reserve comprises an area ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Introduced Species
An introduced species, alien species, exotic species, adventive species, immigrant species, foreign species, non-indigenous species, or non-native species is a species living outside its native distributional range, but which has arrived there by human activity, directly or indirectly, and either deliberately or accidentally. Non-native species can have various effects on the local ecosystem. Introduced species that become established and spread beyond the place of introduction are considered naturalized. The process of human-caused introduction is distinguished from biological colonization, in which species spread to new areas through "natural" (non-human) means such as storms and rafting. The Latin expression neobiota captures the characteristic that these species are ''new'' biota to their environment in terms of established biological network (e.g. food web) relationships. Neobiota can further be divided into neozoa (also: neozoons, sing. neozoon, i.e. animals) and neophyt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
