Baie Larose, or Larose Bay in English, is a bay of Grande Terre, the main island of the

subantarctic The sub-Antarctic zone is a region in the Southern Hemisphere, located immediately north of the Antarctic region. This translates roughly to a latitude of between 46° and 60° south of the Equator. The subantarctic region includes many islands ...

Kerguelen The Kerguelen Islands ( or ; in French commonly ' but officially ', ), also known as the Desolation Islands (' in French), are a group of islands in the sub-Antarctic constituting one of the two exposed parts of the Kerguelen Plateau, a large ...

archipelago An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands, or sometimes a sea containing a small number of scattered islands. Examples of archipelagos include: the Indonesian Arc ...

, a French territory in the southern

Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by t ...

. It is important as a breeding site for

seabird Seabirds (also known as marine birds) are birds that are adapted to life within the marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent evolution, as the same enviro ...

s, especially penguins.

Description

The bay lies on the southern coast of Grande Terre, west of Mont Ross and Gallieni Massif, and encompassing the mouth of Fjord Larose and the tilted monolith known as the ''Doigt de Sainte Anne'' (Saint Anne's Finger).

Important Bird Area

The bay, with part of the south-western slopes of Mont Ross, has been identified as a 20 km² Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because of its breeding seabirds. Of the penguins, there are some 21,500 pairs of kings, 500 pairs of gentoos, 6000 pairs of macaronis and 4000 pairs of eastern rockhoppers. Other birds nesting in the IBA include a few pairs of

wandering albatross The wandering albatross, snowy albatross, white-winged albatross or goonie (''Diomedea exulans'') is a large seabird from the family Diomedeidae, which has a circumpolar range in the Southern Ocean. It was the last species of albatross to be desc ...

es, Antarctic and

slender-billed prion The slender-billed prion (''Pachyptila belcheri'') or thin-billed prion, is a species of petrel, a seabird in the family Procellariidae. It is found in the southern oceans. Taxonomy The slender-billed prion was species description, formally ...

s, white-chinned, northern giant and common diving petrels,

Kerguelen shag The Kerguelen shag (''Leucocarbo verrucosus'') is a species of cormorant endemic to the Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, one of the most isolated places on Earth. Many authorities consider it a subspecies of the imperial shag. R ...

Kerguelen tern The Kerguelen tern (''Sterna virgata'') is a tern of the southern hemisphere. This seabird mainly breeds colonially in the Kerguelen Islands, as its common name implies. However, smaller colonies are also found in the Prince Edward Islands (i. ...

black-faced sheathbill The black-faced sheathbill (''Chionis minor''), also known as the lesser sheathbill or paddy bird, is one of only two species of sheathbills, aberrant shorebirds which are terrestrial scavengers of subantarctic islands. Description They are du ...

s and Eaton's pintails.

Antarctic fur seal The Antarctic fur seal (''Arctocephalus gazella''), is one of eight seals in the genus ''Arctocephalus'', and one of nine fur seals in the subfamily Arctocephalinae. Despite what its name suggests, the Antarctic fur seal is mostly distributed i ...

s and

southern elephant seal The southern elephant seal (''Mirounga leonina'') is one of two species of elephant seals. It is the largest member of the clade Pinnipedia and the order Carnivora, as well as the largest extant marine mammal that is not a cetacean. It gets its ...

s also breed on the shores of the bay.BirdLife International. (2012). Important Bird Areas factsheet: Baie Larose. Downloaded from on 2012-01-19.

References

Landforms of the Kerguelen Islands Important Bird Areas of Kerguelen Larose {{FrenchSouthernTerritories-geo-stub