{"id":67958,"date":"2019-01-10T05:40:45","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T12:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=67958"},"modified":"2019-01-10T06:06:17","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T13:06:17","slug":"an-unusual-cormorant-fishing-technique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/10\/an-unusual-cormorant-fishing-technique\/","title":{"rendered":"An Unusual Cormorant Fishing Technique"},"content":{"rendered":"

It isn’t known if this is a novel technique unique to only a few individuals or it’s more widespread among cormorants but just hadn’t been seen or recorded before. Either way, I think it’s fascinating.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"1\/1500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,\u00a0Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

First some background.<\/p>\n

Cormorants in general (we have six species of them in North America) feed primarily on fish and they’re highly skilled at capturing them underwater. This is a Double-crested Cormorant I photographed a couple of years ago with a fish at a local pond. They have several unique adaptations for swallowing large prey and though this bird didn’t swallow this very large fish another cormorant did. I thought it would likely be too big for them to swallow but the second cormorant swallowed it slick as a whistle<\/a>.\u00a0They’re highly opportunistic when it comes to what types of fish they eat and they’ve been documented to prey on over 250 fish species.<\/p>\n

But now perhaps a new species needs to be added to the list.<\/p>\n

Several days ago blog follower Jo Ann Donnelly sent me a link to a fascinating video clip from National Geographic. In the clip diving cormorants are seen wrenching remoras (“suckerfish”) from the underside of a gigantic whale shark off of the tip of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. They don’t come off easily so it’s quite a struggle for the cormorants but they get the job done.\u00a0National Geographic says that as far as they can determine it’s a behavior that had never been filmed before.<\/p>\n

Well, you know me and behaviors. I was enthralled by the clip and watched it several times so I thought some of my readers might be interested too. Here’s the link<\/a>. I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it before.<\/p>\n

Thanks, Jo Ann.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It isn’t known if this is a novel technique unique to only a few individuals or it’s more widespread among cormorants but just hadn’t been seen or recorded before. Either way, I think it’s fascinating.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67962,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,334,1905,8,392],"tags":[1901,141,1902,4398,4399],"class_list":["post-67958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-double-crested-cormorants","category-ecology-and-environment","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-double-crested-cormorant","tag-fish","tag-phalacrocorax-auritus","tag-remora","tag-whale-shark"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/double-crested-cormorant-0667b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-hG6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}