Showing posts with label penguins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penguins. Show all posts
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linda
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Time-lapse video of penguin colonies shows challenges of snow and cold.
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Two penguin rookeries in Antarctica appear in time-lapse over the course of a year. The footage was shot by researchers from the Zoological Society of London and the University of Oxford:
The first colony on the video is of gentoo penguins at Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula... Penguins come and go, then mostly go. The whiteout of winter snows buries the camera. The snow melts, penguins return to establish nests as new snow falls and melts.
The second colony in the video is of king penguins at the much more populated Salisbury Plain on South Georgia Island, where about 200,000 birds gather to nest... You can see that as winter approaches, and as the parents go off to fish for them, the brown woolly chicks huddle together for warmth in groups known as crèches.
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Two penguin rookeries in Antarctica appear in time-lapse over the course of a year. The footage was shot by researchers from the Zoological Society of London and the University of Oxford:
By adapting existing camera technology and using time-lapse photography, we are trialling the development of a new monitoring array for the southern polar region. By monitoring remotely, we hope to be able to ask new questions about the response of Antarctic penguins to their changing world.
Cameras capture daily images of the movements of the penguins, allowing us to collect data on the timings of penguin life cycles at different locations, such as their time of arrival to breed and chick fledging.
The first colony on the video is of gentoo penguins at Brown Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula... Penguins come and go, then mostly go. The whiteout of winter snows buries the camera. The snow melts, penguins return to establish nests as new snow falls and melts.
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| Gentoo penguins with chicks. Credit: Liam Quinn via Wikimedia Commons. |
The second colony in the video is of king penguins at the much more populated Salisbury Plain on South Georgia Island, where about 200,000 birds gather to nest... You can see that as winter approaches, and as the parents go off to fish for them, the brown woolly chicks huddle together for warmth in groups known as crèches.
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| King penguins with chicks. Credit: Ben Tubby via Wikimedia Commons. |
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linda
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| Gentoo penguin and chick. Credit: © Julia Whitty. |
There are big changes underway in penguin colonies in the Antarctic Peninsula.
Why? First up, it's one of the fastest warming regions on Earth.
And we know that a warming climate can shift the phenology—the timing of annually recurring lifecycle events like migrations and flowering—of species.
Phenological shifts can leads to "trophic mismatches." That is, where interacting species fall out of sync.
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| Caribou. Credit: NPS. |
For instance, a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B showed a trophic mismatch between caribou (whose seasonal migration to summer calving ranges is cued by changes in day length) and the plants they feed on in their summer ranges (whose growing season is cued by local temperatures).
Trophic mismatches are increasingly likely in a warming world, especially among migratory species that have no way to know the schedule is speeding up hundreds or thousands of miles away.
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| Adélie penguin and chick. Credit: © Heather Lynch. |
A new paper in MEPS (Marine Ecology Progress Series) takes an interesting look at another aspect of phenological change—the possible effects on species that breed (and compete) together.
Specifically on three penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula: Adélie, chinstrap, and gentoo.
Adélies and chinstraps migrate to their breeding colonies. The gentoo is resident year round.
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| Warming in Antarctica in degrees C per year between 1981-2007.Credit: NASA Earth Observatory, image by Robert Simmon, based on data from Joey Comiso, GSFC. |
You can probably already hypothesize a dynamic among these three species competing for breeding space and to some extent food resources in a rapidly warming area.
The authors of the MEPS paper investigated changes in clutch initiation dates (the date the first egg is laid) of the three species in the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP)—that's the pointy bit at the upper left of the map, above.
The results were striking. From the paper:
We found that clutch initiation was most significantly correlated with October air temperatures such that all 3 species advanced clutch initiation to varying degrees in warmer years. Gentoo penguins were able to advance [clutch initiation dates] almost twice as much (3.2 d°C−1) as Adélie (1.7 d°C−1) and chinstrap penguins (1.8 d°C−1).
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| Chinstrap penguins and chicks. Credit: Hannes Grobe/AWI via Wikimedia Commons. |
What jumps out here is that resident gentoos, who are already on the breeding ground, appear able to accurately judge the advancing spring dates and lay earlier. And this may be the reason, at least in part, as to why Adélies and chinstraps are suffering population declines and gentoos are thriving in the WAP:
- Adélies declining in 18 of 24 surveyed breeding sites
- Chinstraps declining at 16 of 29 surveyed breeding sites
- Gentoos increasing at 32 of 45 surveyed breeding sites
Those numbers are forthcoming in another paper from some of this same team.
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| Heather Lynch counting gentoo penguins at Port Lockroy, Antarctica. Credit: © Julia Whitty. |
BTW, I first wrote about two of these researchers—Heather Lynch and Ron Naveen—in my Mother Jones article March of the Tourists a while back.
The papers:
- Heather J. Lynch, William F. Fagan, Ron Naveen, Susan G. Trivelpiece, Wayne Z. Trivelpiece. Differential advancement of breeding phenology in response to climate may alter staggered breeding among sympatric pygoscelid penguins. MEPS. DOI:10.3354/meps09252.09252
- Eric Post and Mads C Forchhammer. Climate change reduces reproductive success of an Arctic herbivore through trophic mismatch. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. DOI:10.1098/rstb.2007.2207
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linda
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| Ship wake. Credit: Yosemite James via Flickr. |
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| Offshore wind farm wakes. Via. |
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| South Georgia Island cloud wake. Credit: NASA. |
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| Island wakes, Canary Islands. Via Flickr. |
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| Aircraft turbulence wake. Via. |
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| Ship track wakes in the clouds, North Pacific. Credit: NASA. |
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| Comet wake. Credit: NASA via. |
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| Bioluminescent dolphin wakes. Credit: Ammonite via National Geographic. |
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| Icebreaker wake. Via. |
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| Iceberg wake. Via Wikimedia Commons. |
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| Crabeater seal wakes, Southern Ocean. Credit: Steve Nicol via. |
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| Penguin wake. Via. |
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| Ship bow-wake with bow-riding dolphins. Via. |
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| Von Karman vortices, Aletian Islands. Credit: USGS. |
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| Sea turtle wake. Credit: Rosa Say via Flickr. |
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| Sea turtle wake. Via RedBubble. |
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| Surf wake. Via. |
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linda
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| Little blue penguin. Credit: Noodle snacks via Wikimedia Commons. |
Forty-nine of 343 little blue penguins rescued from the oil spill off the New Zealand coast were released back into the ocean yesterday—with more to come in the next few weeks, says Maritime New Zealand.
At least 2,008 birds died.
When Rena grounded on 5 October 2011 it contained 1,712 tons of oil. About 360 tons spilled into the ocean. The last of the 1,319 tons remaining were removed by salvors working under really tough conditions by 13 November. Kudos to them.
The freed penguins were released back into the Bay of Plenty with hopes they'll make their way to their breeding rookery on Rabbit Island.
Bonne chance, little dudes.
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linda
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| Example of a penguin sweater knit by New Zealanders to keep sick, oiled penguins warm. Via the Bay of Plenty Times. |
From the Bay of Plenty Times comes the news that knitters in New Zealand are making sweaters for little blue penguins (aka fairy penguins) oiled in the wreck of the cargo ship Rena.
Nearly 1,300 birds are known dead from the spill already, most penguins. From the Bay of Plenty Times:
A Napier factory has sent a care package off to Tauranga—full of tiny woolly penguin pajamas. The PJ package came about after Napier's Design Spun general manager Brendan Jackson was contacted last week by a local woman whose daughter had been involved in the oil response unit. The recovery crews were coming across oil-smeared penguins who, trying to preen their feathers clean, became more ill.
The Massey University Wildlife Recovery team she was part of had cast their minds back to a similar spill in Tasmania some years ago, where locals knitted pure wool jumpers to be put on the little blue penguins during the recovery phase to prevent them getting at their feathers before they could be washed clean.
It worked, so the word went out to Design Spun, which has a "yarn club'' of devoted knitters. Within a week the four to five dozen bright little jumpers were all knitted and the last of them were sent to Tauranga yesterday.
Some even have messages including one, which has the words "Cut Down on Oil Use'' embroidered lovingly on the front.
Here's the pattern if—like mine—your needles are practically jumping up and down at the prospect.
