Happier Antarctic penguins with less sea ice

Researchers have been surprised to discover that Adelie penguins in Antarctica prefer reduced sea-ice conditions, not just a little, but a lot. As climate models project a rapid reduction in the continent’s sea ice for the rest of the century, this iconic polar predator could be a rare winner of global warming. The results of her research are published on June 24, 2020 in Scientific advances.

In recent decades, Antarctica has seen a steady increase in the extent of its sea ice, frozen seawater, even as its polar twin, the Arctic, has suffered a marked decline. But this is not expected to last much longer as the climate changes, as Antarctica will also project a decrease in its sea ice, with all the consequences of such changes in the marine habitat for organisms living there.

But such consequences are not always negative.

Polar biologists have known for some time that Adelie penguins, the most common penguin species in Antarctica, tend to see population increases during years of low sea ice and suffer massive reproductive failures during those years with the highest ice growth. Marine.

But until now, researchers really didn’t know why this happened. The few studies that mentioned the relationship between population growth and sea ice have only established a correlation, not a cause.

That missing information has now been found. Researchers from the Japan National Polar Research Institute electronically tagged 175 penguins with GPS devices, accelerometers, and video cameras at four stations with different sea ice conditions, allowing them to track penguins on their travels, classify walking behavior, swim and rest, and estimate the number of prey captured during dives.

“It turns out that these penguins are happier with less sea ice,” said lead researcher Yuuki Watanabe of the National Institute for Polar Research. “This may seem counterintuitive, but the underlying mechanism is quite simple.”

He explained that in ice-free conditions, penguins can travel more swimming than walking.

Euphausia superba, left; E. crystallorophias, right) samples were taken from a penguin in January 2017 during an ice-free season and in January 2011 during an ice-covered season, respectively. The krill sampled on the left is much larger than those sampled on the right. The service is 24 centimeters in diameter. Credit: Yuuki Watanabe, National Polar Research Institute “/>

“For penguins, swimming is four times faster than walking. They can be graceful in the water but are very slow on land,” he added.

In seasons with heavy sea ice, penguins have to walk (and sometimes slide) a long way to find cracks in the ice to access the waters where they hunt, sometimes taking quite long breaks along the way.

But when there is less sea ice, penguins can dive anywhere they want, often simply by entering the water right next to their nests. This is more energy and time efficient and extends your power range. Most importantly, this probably reduces competition with other penguins for the prey and allows them to catch more krill, the penguin’s main prey. Less sea ice also means more sunlight enters the water, leading to larger blooms of the plankton that krill feeds on.

However, all of this only happens for penguins that live in the main “continental” part of Antarctica. The opposite is true for penguins that live on the thin Antarctic peninsula that juts out from the mainland or live on its islands.

The researchers have some hypotheses as to why this might be the case, so the next chapter in this story will be to test those ideas as well.

Provided by the Information and Systems Research Organization