Charting the rise and fall of Antarctica's prehistoric penguin populations

Adelie penguins.
Photo credit: Dr Tom Hart.

ANTARCTICA - A study of how penguin populations have changed over the last 30,000 years has shown that between the last ice age and up to around 1,000 years ago penguin populations benefitted from climate warming and retreating ice. This suggests that recent declines in penguins may be because ice is now retreating too far or too fast.

An international team, led by scientists from the University of Southampton and the University of Oxford in the UK and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the USA, has used a genetic technique to estimate when current genetic diversity arose in penguins and to recreate past population sizes.