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Gannets are seabirds comprising the genus Morus in the family Sulidae, closely related to booby. They are known as 'solan' or 'solan goose' in Scotland. A common misconception is that the Scottish name is 'guga' but this is the Gaelic name referring to the chicks only.
Gannets are large white with yellowish heads, black-tipped wings and long bills. Northern gannets are the largest seabirds in the North Atlantic, having a wingspan of up to . The other two species occur in the temperate seas around southern Africa, southern Australia, and New Zealand.
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.
The gannet's supposed capacity for eating large quantities of fish has led to "gannet" becoming a description of somebody with a voracious appetite.
Sula Sgeir off the coast of the Isle of Lewis, St Kilda, Grassholm in Pembrokeshire, Bempton Cliffs in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Little Skellig, Ireland, Cape St Mary's, Newfoundland, and Bonaventure Island, Quebec, are also important northern-gannet breeding sites.
Most fossil gannets are from the Late Miocene or Pliocene, when the diversity of in general was much higher than today. The cause the decline in species at the end of the Pleistocene is not clear; increased competition due to the spread of may have played a role.
The genus Morus is much better documented in the fossil record than Sula, though the latter is more numerous today. The reasons are not clear; boobies possibly were better adapted or simply "lucky" to occur in the right places for dealing with the challenges of the Late Pliocene ecological change, or many more fossil boobies could still await discovery. Notably, gannets are today restricted to temperate oceans, while boobies are also found in tropical waters, whereas several of the prehistoric gannet species had a more equatorial distribution than their congeners of today.
Fossil species of gannets are:
Young gannets were historically used as a food source, a tradition still practised in Ness, Scotland, where they are called "guga". Like examples of continued traditional whale harvesting, the modern-day hunting of gannet chicks results in great controversies as to whether it should continue to be given "exemption from the ordinary protection afforded to sea birds in UK and EU law". The Ness hunt is currently limited to 2,000 chicks per year and dates back at least to the Iron Age. The hunt is considered to be sustainable, since between 1902 and 2003 gannet numbers in Scotland increased dramatically from 30,000 to 180,000.
In The Bookshop Sketch, originally from At Last the 1948 Show (1967), a customer (Marty Feldman) asks the bookshop proprietor (John Cleese) for "the expurgated version" of Olsen's Standard Book of British Birds, "the one without the gannet", because he does not like gannets owing to their "long nasty beaks". Desperate to satisfy the customer, the proprietor tears the page about the gannet out of the book, only for the customer then to refuse to buy it because it is damaged. "The Bookshop Sketch", MontyPython.netArchived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: The sketch is reprised in Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album, where the customer (Graham Chapman) says he does not like the gannet because "they wet their nests."
In Series 1, Episode 3, of The F Word, Gordon Ramsay travels to the northwestern coast of Scotland and is shown how to prepare, cook and eat gannet.Archived at Ghostarchive and the
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