Female penguins are getting stranded along the South American coast

SOUTH AMERICA – Every year, thousands of Magellanic penguins are stranded along the South American coast – from northern Argentina to southern Brazil – 1000 kilometres away from their breeding ground in northern Patagonia. Now researchers have new evidence to explain why the stranded birds are most often female: female penguins venture farther north than males do, where they are apparently more likely to run into trouble. Their findings were reported on 7 January 2019 in Current Biology.

Magellanic penguins,
Photo credit: Takashi Yamamoto

"Anthropogenic threats have been considered to threaten wintering Magellanic penguins along the coasts of northern Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil," said Takashi Yamamoto of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo.

"These include water pollution caused by oil development and marine transport as well as fishery-associated hazards, such as by-catch and depletion of prey species.

"Our results suggest that the northward spatial expansion likely increases the probability to suffer these risks, and particularly so in females."

Single male Magellanic penguin numbers rising at Punta Tombo

ARGENTINA – Like most of their stout-bodied, flippered kin, Magellanic penguins spend much of their lives in the ocean. From late autumn through winter and into spring in the Southern Hemisphere, these South American penguins swim off the coast of southern Brazil, Uruguay and northern Argentina in search of anchovies, sardines and squid.

A young male Magellanic penguin.
Photo: Natasha Gownaris

But as spring turns to summer, they swim thousands of miles south and congregate in big coastal colonies. There, males and females pair off, breed and attempt to rear one or two newly hatched chicks. One of the largest breeding colonies for Magellanic penguins is at Punta Tombo in Argentina, where University of Washington (UW) biology professor P. Dee Boersma and her team at the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels have studied the penguins since 1982. They have documented a population decline at Punta Tombo of more than 40 percent since 1987, along with a rising male-to-female ratio, and have spent years trying to pinpoint its cause.

In a paper published on 2 January 2019 in the journal Ecological Applications, Boersma and UW postdoctoral researcher Natasha Gownaris report that juvenile females are more likely to die at sea, which has caused a skewed sex ratio of nearly three males to every female, as well as population decline. Their study incorporated more than 30 years of population data collected by UW researchers – including banding and studying individual penguins – into models of population dynamics.

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.