“Each winter, thousands of Emperor Penguins leave the ocean and start marching to a remote place in Antarctica for their breeding season. Blinded by blizzards and strong winds, only guided by their instincts, they march to an isolated region, that does not support life for most of the year…”
The famous documentary March of the Penguins, directed by Luc Jacquet, earned the emperor penguin fanfare and admiration around the world. With their charismatic shape and loving nature, emperor penguins reside on the ice and in the ocean waters of Antarctica for the entirety of their lifespan, living on average from 15 to 20 years.
Satellite data has been used to help researchers better understand emperor penguin populations and how they respond to environmental variability, including the threat of a rapidly warming planet. But the information gleaned so far remains too limited to significantly help conservation efforts. Enter André Ancel, a researcher who led a team on a mission to study the remaining areas where emperor penguins might breed. His team recently published their findings in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation.
March of the Penguins Official Trailer:
Even with their extreme adaption capabilities, emperor penguin breeding colonies are impacted by the fact that chicks often succumb to Antarctic elements. “Though they are one of the tallest and heaviest birds in the world, the survival rate of newborn emperor penguins is really low, only about 19 percent,” Shun Kuwashima, a PhD student at UCSC and self-declared penguin lover, explained. The purpose of Ansel et al.’s research was to predict how the species responds to climate change and to better understand the penguins’ biogeography, or geographical distribution.
“There are only about 54 known breeding colonies,” notes Ancel, “many of which have not yet been comprehensively studied.”
Although the authors did not actually conduct any exploration or examine remote sensing data to locate new emperor penguin colonies, they used data on the location of known colonies to make their findings. Based on the behavioral patterns of penguins, including movement and dispersal, and on the availability of food, the researchers found “six regions potentially sheltering colonies of emperor penguins.”
The approach determined the loxodromic separation distance (the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere) between each pair of geographically adjacent colonies. Then, based on the fact that a breeding adult can travel 100 km from the colony during the breeding period, assuming a circumpolar distribution, the researchers pinpointed the potential areas where emperor penguin colonies might exist or could settle.
The regions identified by Ancel et al. do not fundamentally differ from the areas of other known colonies, which makes it possible that there are more than 54 colonies. It is similarly plausible that emperor penguins are adapting to new conditions through behavioral changes, Ancel indicated.
“Emperor penguins, like many other sea animals, are critically influenced by the harmful effects of global warming,” Kuwashima told GlacierHub in a recent interview. “The entire emperor penguin population could decrease by a third by the end of the century due to the inadvertent effect of climate change.”
It is heartbreaking to imagine that we may no longer be able to see the adorable emperor penguin chicks in Antarctica, but emperor penguins are in danger. As research conducted by Trathan et al. in 2011 showed, “In the Antarctic Peninsula region, one of the most rapidly warming parts of the planet during the latter part of the 20th century, one emperor colony has disappeared.”