Aquatic birds might be endangered | New

Straits Times

By KAREN WEINTRAUB

AFTER three decades out of the public eye, a giant colony of king penguins has
lost 90 per cent of its population, according to a new study.

The colony of 500,000 breeding pairs, long considered the largest of king
penguins in the world, lived on the Île aux Cochons (or, less elegantly, Pig Island),
a French territory in the Crozet archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean between
South Africa and Antarctica.

But, the penguins haven’t been counted in person since 1982 when researchers
last visited.
In late 2016, researchers flew over it by helicopter and saw noticeably fewer
penguins than expected.

Since then, by examining three decades of satellite images, researchers have

concluded that there are just 60,000 breeding pairs left on the island.

“It was really a surprise for us,” said Henri Weimerskirch, a co-author on the new
paper, published in Antarctic Science, and a member of the research teams in
1982 and 2016. “It’s really very depressing.”

The research team suspects that climate change could be playing a role, as it has
with other colonies of penguins in parts of Antarctica. But competition for
resources, diseases and relocation may possibly have contributed to population
losses.

Researchers plan to do a head count on the island but they can’t get there until
late fall 2019 at the earliest, because of the cost and timing issues, said
Weimerskirch, research director of the Chizé Centre for Biological Studies at the
French National Centre for Scientific Research.

A protected nature preserve, Pig Island isn’t easy to reach, and the animals can’t
be seen from the water, because the colony is situated inland, he said.

If the count from the satellite images proves accurate, it would significantly
reduce the global population of king penguins, estimated at 1.5 million to 1.7
million breeding pairs worldwide with this loss. They had not been considered
endangered before, but might be, Weimerskirch said.

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The colony viewed from a helicopter in December 2016, when researchers noticed
far fewer penguins than expected. NYT PIX

King penguins are the second largest in population after emperor penguins. They
don’t nest, but lay one egg and parents take turns incubating the egg with an
abdominal layer called a brood patch for two months. King penguins leave their
young and swim south to forage for fish and squid in the waters of the Antarctic
polar front, where cold, deep water mixes with more temperate seas. If they can’t
reach this polar front and can’t swim back within about a week, their chicks will
starve to death.

The trouble seems to have started in 1997 when an El Niño weather event drove
up temperatures considerably for a year, pushing their food sources so far south
that the chicks died before their parents could return to feed them.

Emiliano Trucchi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Ferrara in Italy,

who also studies king penguins in the Crozet archipelago, said he was disturbed
by the report.

Work that Trucchi and his colleagues published earlier this year raised questions
about how king penguins would cope with warming seas from climate change. His

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model predicted the Crozet penguins would lose their habitat by 2100 and be
forced to relocate or die.

A local problem like what is happening on Pig Island could hasten their decline,
Trucchi said.

“It deserves further investigations,” he said. “It’s a very peculiar process and we
need to understand how to fit this into the big picture.” NYT