satellite view from PMNM
E komo mai; welcome! Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is surrounded by a lei of foam in the middle of the North Pacific; it's a beautiful, special place.

Not only are there albatross on Midway, but many other interesting kinds of wildlife, both on the land and in the sea. Please enjoy exploring FOAM, an educational blog actively done while on Midway from May through August 2010. Posts are added from off-Midway, as information becomes available. If you're interested in a particular topic, please use the search box or the alphabetical list of "labels" along the left side of the blog page.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

What's your food? --brine flies?

Btw, Happy Mothers Day everybody! My ducklings let me sleep a little longer than usual this morning.
I'd like to see lots of photos and videos in our blog. This video shows some of my relatives eating flies. It might take a bit of time to load, but I think BBC Arkive's video "Laysan Ducks feeding on swarms of flies at Laysan Atoll" is really funny!


7 comments:

Uncle Ulua said...

You ducks eat FLIES??!!

Kahiko said...

Yes, we do, but not house flies. When I lived on Laysan Atoll I ate brine flies that hatched out of the really salty lake that's there. Now that I'm on Midway, where there aren't any brine flies, I'm happy to dabble along the shore of the freshwater pond here and eat really small, microscopic plankton floating in the water, plus seeds and leaves.

If you don't eat flies, Uncle, what do you eat?

Uncle Ulua said...

I'm a fish, so I don't eat anything off da land, like flies; I only eat stuff in da ocean, and I'm one of da APEX PREDATORS here! That means I'm one of da top carnivores, da meat-eaters. I eat fish that eat other, small sea animals. So, I like eat uhu (parrotfish) and da kine hīnālea (wrasses.) Ono!

Edward said...

You might be interested to know that we albatross sometimes travel thousands of miles, for example to the far North Pacific Ocean, to catch our food. My friend Aunty Moana and her Laysan Albatross `ohana (family) eat squid, fish, crustaceans and flying fish eggs. Since I don't see in the dark as well as Aunty Moana I don't eat too many squid, since they come to the ocean surface at night. I really like caviar...that is: flying fish eggs; they're delicious.

Auntie Moana said...

Isn't it nice that we don't eat each other? --that's friendly!
Edward's giving good info about us albatross. However, there's a problem -- we sometimes accidentally eat marine debris (floating trash), which is definitely not good for us. In fact, I've had friends and family die probably because they swallowed sharp pieces of plastic marine debris. I just know that's going to be a big topic in our FOAM blog.

Barb said...

I must be honest -- I've eaten ulua. Not any of Uncle's own family, because the ulua I ate was at a restaurant in Hale`iwa, on O`ahu's north shore. And I know that Uncle and his `ohana stay around Midway; they don't travel down to O`ahu.
When I come to Midway, I PROMISE not to eat any ulua. For one thing, the Atoll is a national wildlife refuge, where we visitors are not allowed to catch and eat fish from the Atoll's shallow waters. Another reason not to eat Midway's reef fish...they can be the source of ciguatera, a poison and I don't want to get sick!

Uncle Ulua said...

Barb: dat's cool. You can eat fish; I eat fish myself.
What I DON'T like is when you humans catch choke fish. Don't catch so many that we can't reproduce fast enough to keep our species going. We need lotsa young, keiki fish! Also, don't take da really big fish; da big females can produce lotsa healthy eggs that grow up to be strong ulua for da next generation!