Emperor penguin foraging behaviour revealed

ANTARCTICA – An unavoidable delay in a research ship's voyage to Antarctica resulted in some surprising and important findings about the behaviour of emperor penguins.

Dr Kim Goetz observing emperor penguins during
the study at Cape Colbeck. Photo: Patrick Robinson

A newly-published paper written by NIWA marine ecologist Dr Kim Goetz and collaborators outlines the previously unknown diving and long-distance swimming abilities of emperor penguins outside the breeding season.

Dr Goetz’s project involved tagging 20 emperor penguins in 2013 and analysing the data on their movements transmitted via satellite. She discovered the penguins travelled between 273 km and nearly 9000 km and completed dives that ranged between 1 and 32.2 minutes, exceeding the previous recorded dive record of 27.6 minutes.

But it was finding the penguins in the first place that was most intriguing.

Penguins go through the flow

SUBANTARCTIC – Colonies of breeding king penguins behave much like particles in liquids do, according to a new study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and international colleagues. This "liquid" organisation and structure enables breeding colonies to protect themselves against predators while also keeping members together.

A king penguin breeding colony on
Possession Island, Crozet Archipelago.
Photo by © Céline Le Bohec (CNRS / IPEV / CSM)  

King penguins are threatened by climate change with warming temperatures shifting their main food sources farther south. The new information on how penguin colonies form and structure themselves –and how colonies may depend on the physical features of new breeding grounds – is crucial to predicting the species' resilience.

"King penguin colonies are also of special interest because only they and emperor penguins do not build nests, and no one has previously examined the effect this has on their colonies," said Richard Gerum, a Ph.D. student at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg and lead author of the paper published in the Journal of Physics D.