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Gadfly petrels of the Pterodroma feae-complex in southwestern Atlantic Ocean, Brazil

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Abstract

The Pterodroma feae complex comprises three cryptically looking gadfly petrels (Cape Verde Pterodroma feae, Desertas Pterodroma deserta, and Zino’s Pterodroma madeira), once regarded as a single species, the Fea’s Petrel, P. feae. Recent research using geolocators to track and understand their movements away from breeding grounds demonstrated that both Zino’s and Desertas Petrels do undergo some long-distance movements. They perform a trans-equatorial migration to remote, previously unknown, wintering grounds, in Brazilian waters off the northeast and southern coast of Brazil during their non-breeding season. However, despite several decades of systematic and intensive beached seabird projects along extensive stretches of the Brazilian coast in these two regions, no specimens of either of these gadfly petrels have been reported. Here, we document two photographic specimen records of gadfly petrels off the Brazilian coast, provide comparative criteria for at sea identification and discuss difficulties to determine species level. First, a heavy-billed male Desertas Petrel was photographed over the continental shelf off the Rio Grande do Sul, southern Brazil, and a second specimen off Espírito Santo, southeastern Brazil, over the Vitoria Seamount, either a Desertas or a Cape Verde Petrel. Apart from Brazilian records based solely on geolocator tracking results, these seem to be the first documented specimen records for Brazil of any species within the feae-group, as well as for the southwestern Atlantic Ocean. Further, these records confirm that Brazilian offshore waters are important non-breeding feeding grounds for the feae-group.

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Acknowledgements

Authors are grateful to Bob Flood for encouraging the publication of records and for checking the identification of specimens, Mar de Abrolhos crew (Isaias, Ronaldo Adriano, and André Carlos Marques) for their logistical support during research off Vitoria Seamount, as well as the fieldwork support provided by Projeto Albatroz. We are greatly indebted for their essential feedback on the critical identification of our gadfly images from a couple of the world’s leading pelagic experts (who have had extensive experience with the feae-complex), namely, Hadoram Shirihai, Bob Flood and Steve N.G. Howell. Our research in Espírito Santo was carried out as part of the Aquatic Biodiversity Monitoring Program, Ambiental Area I, established by the Technical-Scientific Agreement, DOU number 30/2018, between FEST and Renova Foundation. L.B. is a research fellow from CNPq (Process No. 311409/2018-0).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratório de Aves Aquáticas e Tartarugas Marinhas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande – FURG, Rio Grande, RS, Brazil

    Giuliano M. Brusco, Karina Bohrer do Amaral, Márcio Repenning & Leandro Bugoni

  2. Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Belém, Pará, Brazil

    Andrew Whittaker

  3. Instituto Oceanográfico, Universidade de São Paulo – IO-USP, São Paulo, SP, Brazil

    Francisco Luiz Vicentini-Neto

Authors
  1. Giuliano M. Brusco
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  2. Karina Bohrer do Amaral
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  3. Márcio Repenning
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  4. Andrew Whittaker
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  5. Francisco Luiz Vicentini-Neto
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  6. Leandro Bugoni
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Correspondence to Giuliano M. Brusco.

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Communicated by Alexandre Aleixo

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Brusco, G.M., do Amaral, K.B., Repenning, M. et al. Gadfly petrels of the Pterodroma feae-complex in southwestern Atlantic Ocean, Brazil. Ornithol. Res. 29, 160–165 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43388-021-00066-x

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