After a bad winter in the ocean, female Magellanic penguins suffer most, study shows

ARGENTINA – Every autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, Magellanic penguins leave their coastal nesting sites in South America. For adults, their summer task – breeding, or at least trying to – is complete. Newly fledged chicks and adults gradually head out to sea to spend the winter feeding. They won’t return to land until spring.

Adult Magellanic penguin and chicks
Credit: Dee Boersma/Center for Ecosystem Sentinels

Yet life for these birds when they winter offshore is largely a mystery to the scientists who study Magellanic penguins – and who advocate for their conservation amid declining population numbers.

“The winter period is something of a black box for us in terms of understanding Magellanic penguins,” said Ginger Rebstock, a University of Washington (UW) research scientist.

“We know the least amount about this part of their year.”

But research by Rebstock and P. Dee Boersma, a UW professor of biology and founder of the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels, is starting to pry open that black box and discover how Magellanic penguins from one nesting site, Punta Tombo in Argentina, fare during the winter months.

And the winner of Penguin of the Year is...

NEW ZEALAND – Little penguin Timmy has out-flippered Mo to become the National Aquarium of New Zealand’s first ever Penguin of the Year.

Penguin of the Year 2018 winner Timmy
Photo credit: National Aquarium of
New Zealand

The finalists are both “bad boys” who regularly feature in the Naughty and Good Penguin of the Month competition, which the keepers started just over a year ago.

Members of the public were asked to vote for their favourites through social media and the National Aquarium website in the first two weeks of October, after which they were asked to choose their favourite between Timmy and Mo.

Corban Bell, seven, and his family found Timmy washed up on a Napier beach three years ago. They knew something was wrong so they popped him in a lunchbox and brought him to the National Aquarium which has become his permanent home. It is believed his spinal injury was from a possible boat strike. With physio he can now walk a little, but he has been unable to return to the wild.

Corban and his father, Ian, were at the National Aquarium this morning for the announcement, where he got to feed Timmy.

Fiordland penguins' "crazy" journeys studied by scientists

NEW ZEALAND – Imagine making a 7,000km journey just for dinner. That, University of Otago scientists have found, is the life of the elusive Fiordland penguin.

In a study, just published in PLoS One, a group of international scientists satellite-tracked Fiordland penguins during their post-breeding journeys and found the birds cover distances of up to 7,000km in just eight weeks.

Largest king penguin colony has shrunk nearly 90 percent

SUB-ANTARCTIC – The world's biggest colony of king penguins is found in the National Nature Reserve of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (TAAF). Using high-resolution satellite images, researchers from the Chizé Centre for Biological Studies (CNRS/University of La Rochelle) have detected a massive 88% reduction in the size of the penguin colony, located on Île aux Cochons, in the Îles Crozet archipelago. The causes of the colony's collapse remain a mystery but may be environmental. These findings were published in Antarctic Science on 25 July 2018.

Île aux Cochons king penguin colony in 1982.
Photo © Henry Weimerskirch

Known since the 1960s, the colony of king penguins on Île aux Cochons, in the southern Indian Ocean, had the distinction of being the world's biggest colony of king penguins and second biggest colony of all penguins. However, due to its isolation and inaccessibility, no new estimates of its size were made over the past decades.

The Chizé team used high-resolution satellite images to measure changes in the size of the colony since the island was last visited by a crew of scientists in 1982. At the time, the colony included 500,000 breeding pairs and consisted of over two million penguins. To calculate the area occupied by the colony at different times between 1960 and the present, the researchers studied changes in its contours over the years. They found that the colony has shrunk, yielding its territory to encroaching vegetation. Photographs taken from a helicopter during the Antarctic Circumpolar Expedition confirm that the colony's penguin population has plummeted.

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.

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.