Are emperor penguins eating enough?

ANTARCTICA – For emperor penguins waddling around a warming Antarctic, diminishing sea ice means less fish to eat. How the diets of these tuxedoed birds will hold up in the face of climate change is a big question scientists are grappling with.

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have developed a way to help to determine the foraging success of emperor penguins by using time-lapse video observations relayed to scientists thousands of miles away. The new remote sensing method is described in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Podgy penguins make better breeders

AUSTRALIA - Putting on a little weight over winter increases a little penguin’s sexual success according to new research published in Royal Society Open Science last month.  

Researchers at Phillip Island Nature Parks, Australia, in collaboration with scientists from the French Research Council, discovered the winter body mass of little penguins has a carry-over effect on timing of breeding and reproductive success during spring and summer.

“Little penguin parents that put on weight in winter, and were heavier than their mass before or after July, were more likely to lay their eggs early, and males were more likely to successfully breed,” André Chiaradia, research scientist at Phillip Island Nature Parks said.

Emperor penguin in peril says study

Stephanie Jenouvrier and emperor
penguin chick.
Photo credit: Stephanie Jenouvrier

ANTARCTICA - An international team of scientists studying emperor penguin populations across Antarctica has found that the iconic birds are in danger of dramatic declines by the end of the century due to climate change. Their study, published recently in Nature Climate Change, found the emperor penguin is “fully deserving of endangered status due to climate change”.

The emperor penguin is currently under consideration for inclusion under the US Endangered Species Act. Criteria to classify species by their extinction risk are based on the global population dynamics.

Penguin diving through the scales of time

Little penguin.
Photo credit: Phillip Island Nature Parks.

AUSTRALIA - An international research team has uncovered complex patterns in little penguin dives and revealed a sophisticated level of organised and adaptive behaviour.

The detailed patterns are like the repeated design on a head of broccoli, or the intricate geometry found in growing crystals, swirling galaxies and heart rates. The term “fractals” is used to describe these repeated patterns across varying spatial or temporal scales.

Study predicts climate change will shift penguins' food sources

King penguins in the Crozet Islands.
Photo by ¡WOUW!. Some rights reserved.

SUBANTARCTIC - King penguins' main food sources will move south as climate change warms the sea surface, a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows.

Scientists from CNRS in France used a long-term tracking dataset of king penguins breeding on the subantarctic Crozet Islands to understand and model where adult penguins forage while they are incubating and brooding chicks, and to predict how the warming of the southern oceans would affect their foraging distribution.

The models predict that the penguins' optimum feeding zones (associated with the polar front) will shift south by about 400 km by 2100. This means that the distance the penguins will have to travel to reach their main food sources would double.

This is bad news - unless the birds develop alternative foraging strategies or move to new breeding sites, such a shift in their foraging range would have a negative effect on the Crozet population in the long term. 

Source
Penguins' food goes south, 3 March 2012, Birdwatch

Proceedings of the Royal Society B citation
Péron, C, Weimerskirch, H and Bost, C-A. 2012. Projected poleward shift of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) foraging range at the Crozet Islands, southern Indian Ocean. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.2705.