article) in South Africa, where 10,000 pairs of gannets nested, together with 4800 pairs of Cape cormorant and other species such as gulls and jackass penguin. Within a period of 3 years, a few specialized sacred ibis individuals out of the 400 that roosted on the island had fed on at least 152 eggs of the cormorant (other species were even more ovivorous). In a study of pellets and stomachs contents of nestlings in the Free State, South Africa, food is mostly reported to consist of frogs (mainly Amietia angolensis and Xenopus laevis), Potamonautes warreni crabs, blow fly maggots, Sphingidae caterpillars, and adult beetles. During the first 10 days of life nestlings fed mainly on crabs and beetles, and later mainly on Sphingidae caterpillars and more beetles. The breeding colony collected different (proportions of) prey the subsequent year. The food of one one‐month old nestlings at Lake Shala, Ethiopia, consisted of beetle larvae, caterpillars and beetles. In France, adult ibises fed largely on the invasive crayfish Procambarus clarkii, for nestlings larvae of Eristalis species are important. In France, they sometimes supplement their diet by feeding at rubbish tips in the winter. Predators The most important predator of nestlings of the sacred ibis in Kenya is the African fish eagle, which preferentially searches for the largest (sub-)colonies to attack, but in Ethiopia and South Africa it poses less of a threat. Diseases This species was reported to be susceptible to avian botulism in a list of dead animals found around a man-made lake in South Africa which tested positive for the pathogen in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During a large scale mortality of Cape cormorants from avian cholera in 1991 in western South Africa, small numbers of sacred ibis were killed. The new species Chlamydia ibidis was isolated from feral sacred ibis in France in 2013; it infected 6–7 of the 70 birds tested. In 1887, the Italian scientist Corrado Parona reported a 3 cm Physaloptera species of nematode in the orbital cavity of a sacred ibis collected in Metemma, Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1882. He thought it was perhaps a new species, as it differed morphologically from earlier seen worms. A single adult female was recovered, and it has never been seen again. As the Physaloptera species infecting birds are generally parasites of the intestines of raptors; it might be an artefact, or perhaps a misidentification, or possibly