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.

Sad end to first journey of yellow-eyed penguin chick Takaraha

NEW ZEALAND – Takaraha, a juvenile yellow-eyed penguin that captured attention in recent weeks, has been euthanised after suffering a non-survivable injury to its left flipper, believed to be inflicted by a predator.

Takaraha was one of 23 juvenile yellow-eyed penguins being remotely tracked by University of Otago researchers investigating dramatically declining survival rates of the endangered species. The young bird made headlines after setting a blistering speed up the South Island’s east coast on its fledgling journey just over a fortnight ago.

First tracking of yellow-eyed penguin juveniles

NEW ZEALAND – A select group of this season’s yellow-eyed penguin chicks are having their first expeditions into the ocean remotely tracked, as University of Otago researchers investigate dramatically declining survival rates of the endangered species.

Improvements in tracking technology have made the research possible, with transmitters now small enough to fit on yellow-eyed penguins.

Each of the 23 penguins involved in the study is equipped with a satellite tag, transmitting messages to overhead satellites, which triangulate the penguin’s position on the ocean’s surface. Some of the devices are able to send stored GPS positions by text message every two days. The tags are attached to the bird’s lower back using cloth tape under a small patch of feathers, and are secured with cable ties.

'Supercolony' of Adelie penguins discovered in Antarctica

ANTARCTICA – For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic peninsula, has been steadily declining – or so biologists have thought. But a new study led by Stony Brook University ecologist Heather Lynch and colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is providing new insights about this penguin species. In a Scientific Reports paper, the international research team announced the discovery of a previously unknown “supercolony” of more than 1,500,000 Adélie penguins in the Danger Islands, a chain of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip.

King penguins may be on the move very soon

SUB-ANTARCTIC – King penguin colonies in Crozet, Kerguelen and Marion sub-Antarctic islands  – more than 70% of the global king penguin population – may be nothing more than a memory in a matter of decades, as global warming will force the birds to move south, or disappear. This is the conclusion of a study carried out by an international team of researchers and published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

King penguins. Photo (c) Celine LeBohec.

"The main issue is that there is only a handful of islands in the Southern Ocean and not all of them are suitable to sustain large breeding colonies" said Robin Cristofari, lead author of the study, from the Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC) (a mixed research unit of the CNRS and the University of Strasbourg) and the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM).

King penguins are picky animals – in order to form a colony where they can mate, lay eggs and rear chicks over a year, they need tolerable temperatures all year round, no winter sea ice around the island, and smooth beach of sand or pebbles. But, above all, they need an abundant and reliable food source close by to feed their chicks.

How to tell male king penguins from female ones - all the time

SUBANTARCTIC - It is difficult to distinguish males from females among king penguins, but a new Ibis study reveals that king penguins can be sexed with an accuracy of 100% based on the sex-specific syllable pattern of their vocalisations. In comparison, using beak length to sex king penguins is accurate 79% of the time.

Male-female king penguin couple
Image (c) Hannah Kriesell

Annual yellow-eyed penguin breeding results remain low

NEW ZEALAND – The Department of Conservation (DOC) and Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust estimate there are 250 breeding pairs of yellow-eyed penguins (hoiho) along the Otago and Southland coastline as their annual breeding season comes to an end.

This estimate is similar to the past two seasons (250 pairs and 260 pairs) but considerably lower than historically, where there have been between 400–600 breeding pairs.

No-fishing zones help endangered penguins

SOUTH AFRICA – Small no-fishing zones around colonies of African penguins can help this struggling species, new research shows.

African penguins. Photo credit: Richard Sherley

Working with the South African government, researchers from the University of Exeter and University of Cape Town tested bans on catching "forage fish" such as sardines and anchovies – key prey for the endangered penguins – from 20 km around their breeding islands.

The body condition and survival of chicks improved when the no-fishing zones were in place.

More research is needed, but the scientists say the fishing closures should continue in South Africa and should be considered elsewhere.