Antarctic petrel

Taxonomy and systematics

Captain James Cook saw the Antarctic petrel on his second voyage to the south Pacific. In 1773 both Cook and the naturalist Georg Forster mentioned the petrel in their separate accounts of the voyage. Forster wrote:

On the 17th, in the forenoon, we crossed the antarctic circle, and advanced into the southern frigid zone, which had hitherto remained impenetrable to all navigators. Some days before this period we had seen a new species of petrel, of a brown colour, with a white belly and rump, and a large white spot on the wings, which we now named the antarctic petrel, as we saw great flights of twenty on thirty of them hereabouts, of which we shot many that unfortunately never fell into the ship.

Based on these reports in 1783 the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon included the petrel as "Le pétrel antarctique ou Damier brun" in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The species was also included by John Latham in his A General Synopsis of Birds. When the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin updated Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae in 1789 he included a brief description of the Antarctic petrel, coined the binomial name Procellaria antarctica and cited the earlier authors. The Antarctic petrel is now the only species placed in the genus Thalassoica that was introduced in 1853 by the German naturalist Ludwig Reichenbach. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek thalassa meaning "sea" with oikos meaning "house". The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised. The word petrel is derived from St. Peter and the story of his walking on water. This is in reference to the petrel's habit of appearing to run on the water to take off.

The Antarctic petrel is placed in the family Procellariidae of the order Procellariiformes. This petrel along with the snow petrel, the Cape petrel, the giant petrels, and the fulmars, are considered to be a different subclade from the other Procellariidae members. They share certain identifying features. First, they have nasal passages that attach to the upper bill called naricorns. Although the nostrils on the petrels are on the top of the upper bill. The bills of Procellariiformes are also unique in that they are split into between seven and nine horny plates. On petrels, one of these plates forms the hooked portion of the upper bill. They produce a stomach oil made up of wax esters and triglycerides that is stored in the proventriculus. This can be sprayed out of their mouths as a defence against predators and as an energy rich food source for chicks and for the adults during their long flights. Finally, they also have a salt gland that is situated above the nasal passage and helps desalinate their bodies, due to the high amount of ocean water that they imbibe. It excretes a high saline solution from their nose.