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Gannets can achieve speeds of 100 km/h (62.13 mph) as they strike the water, enabling them to catch fish at a much greater depth than most airborne birds. [ 5 ] The gannet's supposed capacity for eating large quantities of fish has led to "gannet" becoming a description of somebody with a voracious appetite.
The masked booby (Sula dactylatra), also called the masked gannet or the blue-faced booby, is a large seabird of the booby and gannet family, Sulidae. First described by the French naturalist René-Primevère Lesson in 1831, the masked booby is one of six species of booby in the genus Sula. It has a typical sulid body shape, with a long pointed ...
The Australasian gannet (Morus serrator), also known as the Australian gannet or tākapu, is a large seabird of the booby and gannet family, Sulidae.Adults are mostly white, with black flight feathers at the wingtips and lining the trailing edge of the wing.
The name is derived from súla, the Old Norse and Icelandic word for the other member of the family Sulidae, the gannet. [ 5 ] The English name booby was possibly based on the Spanish slang term bobo , meaning "stupid", [ 6 ] as these tame birds had a habit of landing on board sailing ships, where they were easily captured and eaten.
The word "stearn" was used for these birds in Old English as early as the eighth century, and appears in the poem The Seafarer, written in the ninth century or earlier. Variants such as "tearn" occurred by the eleventh century, although the older form lingered on in Norfolk dialect for several centuries. [ 21 ]
The diet of red-footed boobies consists mostly of fish (such as Exocoetidae flying fish and Gempylidae escolars) and squid. [17] Studies of the red-footed booby on Christmas Island have found that most fish eaten are 6–15 cm (2.4–5.9 in) long, with a maximum length of 20 cm (7.9 in), and most squid are 6–10 cm (2.4–3.9 in), with a ...
The great skua (Stercorarius skua), sometimes known by the name bonxie in Britain, is a large seabird in the skua family Stercorariidae. It is roughly the size of a herring gull . It mainly eats fish caught at the sea surface or taken from other birds.
There exists no single definition of which groups, families and species are seabirds, and most definitions are in some way arbitrary. Elizabeth Shreiber and Joanna Burger, two seabird scientists, said, "The one common characteristic that all seabirds share is that they feed in saltwater; but, as seems to be true with any statement in biology, some do not."