The March of the Penguins Hits The Wall
Global warming and shifting weather patterns are taking a severe toll on penguin populations in Antarctica, South America, South Africa, and the Galapagos. Seth Borenstein, writing for the Associated Press on a new study in the July issue of Bioscience, reports that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—with one penguin species already on the Endangered Species List—is considering adding ten more. University of Washington conservation biologist P. Dee Boersma, author of the Bioscience paper, told him: “Now we’re seeing effects [of human caused warming and pollution] in the most faraway places in the world. Many penguins we thought would be safe because they are not that close to people. And that’s not true.”
Adelie penguins in Antarctica are particularly hard hit, says Ron Naveen of Oceanites, a scientific foundation compiling the Antarctic Site Inventory, a key database of biological information on the flora and fauna of the great southern continent. Naveen and other biologists working from Petermann Island in the Antarctic Peninsula have found that while Adelie numbers have plummeted, Gentoo penguin populations have increased. The biologists speculate that Gentoos are proving more successful in warmer conditions because they’re “deep divers,” able to go farther and deeper in search of krill, a main food source, while the smaller Adelies are reacting to scarcity in shallower water.
I had the good fortune to take part in an Oceanites count on Petermann in 2001 while on a Lindblad Antarctic expedition, and saw historical artifacts—pieces of linoleum and metal from the first expedition here by the French explorer, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, whose ship was trapped here in the winter of 1909—appearing like magic out of the melting ice, an unforgettable image of the planet’s rapid warming.
[CF]
