Ice melts – Pingu dead

It’s not easy for an emperor penguin chick. Between May and July, the little shuttle hatches and plunges into a world of darkness. Because while at our longitude at the moment the days are long and the nights are short, in Antarctica it is winter and the days are marked by nights – and only by nights.

More than six months later, around December, the situation looks different. Depending on the location, the sun shines 24 hours a day on Antarctica. This is when the little emperor penguins fledge; their gray down is then replaced by robust white and black plumage.

Until now, the Kaiser chicks live exclusively on the ice. Only after fledging can they swim and feed themselves. But it’s precisely this ice that they’re now missing, as a new study confirms. The consequences are fatal.

The study, led by geographer Peter Fretwell, analyzes the breeding behavior of five specific colonies of emperor penguins living in the Beringshausen Sea in western Antarctica. In 2022 there was so little ice that all chicks from four of the five colonies probably died.

In fact, ‘never’ may be the wrong word in this context – emperor penguins have only been explicitly observed and studied for a relatively short time. “About 15 years ago, emperor penguins were among the least known animals in the world,” Fretwell told Scientific American magazine. One of the reasons for this is that the emperors’ colonies are impossible for humans to reach.

Fretwell and his team have been studying the majestic southern birds for about a decade. Using high-resolution satellite images, they estimated the population of the individual colonies.

Shockingly, the latest assessments now indicated that four of the five colonies had been abandoned by early December – before the chicks had even fledged. As an example, here is the colony on Smiley Island:

The situation is similar for three other colonies. Accordingly, the scientists estimate that about 10,000 chicks drowned or starved to death in all four colonies.

“We’ve been watching the sea ice disappear for years,” said Michelle LaRue of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who was also involved in the study. It is only logical that the emperor penguin colonies are now affected.

However, you did not expect that the problems for the penguins would arise so quickly. And: “The fact that this is happening in several places at the same time is extremely worrying,” says the researcher.

If the lack of ice proves to be a long-term problem, the consequences for the emperor penguins will be even more serious. After about three failed breeding seasons, a colony starts looking for a new nest site. But since the entire Bellingshausen Sea appears to be affected, the penguins would have to migrate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles away, Fretwell said:

How the changed conditions will affect the adult emperor penguins can only be guessed. But their future looks bleak: There’s even less ice around Antarctica this year — an all-time low. So far no satellite count has been carried out for 2023 because the sun is not yet shining on the South Pole.

The reasons for the missing ice are not conclusively known. The study notes that the 2022 and 2023 ice anomalies are most likely related to the La Niña weather phenomenon. Nevertheless, current climate models assume that the amount of sea ice will continue to decrease in the future.

And so Fretwell concludes, “In the long run, the fate of the emperor penguin is in our hands: how much carbon we put in the atmosphere, how much we warm the planet, how much the oceans warm and the climate changes.”