On average, a skua is about 56 cm (22 in) long, and 121 cm (48 in) across the wings.

The eggs and young of other birds are an important food source for most skua species during the nesting season.

These characteristics are not shared by the larger species, all native to the Southern Hemisphere except for the great skua.

3. The spill occurred at the peak of hatching for South Polar skua chicks, thus creating pre spill and spill groups of age matched chicks.

42. A population wide mortality event of South Polar skua chicks occurred during a diesel oil spill from the Bahía Paraiso at Palmer Station, Antarctica, in 1989.

All South Polar skua chicks in the 1989 sample that were alive when the spill began died within a three week period while oil was present, although during the oil spill few chicks appeared to die from starvation or during storms.

It is likely that both oil exposure and food limitation contributed to the stress on the skua adults and chicks, but because natural populations are complex and subject to many physical and biological variables, it is not certain that the spill was solely responsible for the mortality rate.

List of target drones Airspeed Queen Wasp ATL MSAT 500NG ATL GSAT 200NG BQM 74 Chukar Curtiss Queen Seamew de Havilland Queen Bee Denel Dynamics Skua DRDO Lakshya Meggitt Banshee Fairey Queen GAF Jindivik GAF Turana Miles Queen Martinet Ryan Firebee TAI Şimşek de Havilland Vampire QF 4 See also Target tug, the towed variant Powered seaborne target, the naval counterpart References