Penguin population declines are
found to occur in hotter years
Wednesday 3 August
2016 11.00 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 3 August 201611.02 BST
We know the world is warming, and
we know humans are the main reason. But so what? The thing we’d really like to
know is, what will the impacts be on our planet, its biodiversity, our society,
our economies? It is only through understanding the impacts of climate change
that action for reducing greenhouse gases can be motivated.
This is one of the reasons I was
so interested in a very recent study from the University
of Delaware, which addressed how penguins will fare in a
warming world. The article was published in Scientific Reports and is available
open access so anyone with an internet connection can read it here.
Lead author Megan
Cimino and her colleagues looked at Adelie penguin populations
and asked whether their years of increasing or decreasing population
corresponded to warm, cold, or normal temperatures. In the Antarctic, which is
where these penguins live, the situation is a bit complex because the land area
is large and weather/climate changes are not consistent across the
region.
For instance, large parts of the
Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) are warming quite rapidly, amongst the most
rapid in the world. On the other hand, in the East, some areas are warming just
a little while others are cooling slightly. Since Adelie penguins live on the
periphery of the ice sheet, they are exposed to a wide range of Antarctic
climate regions.
The authors found that penguin
colony declines occur preferentially in years where the sea waters are warmer
than average. This is in contrast to colonies whose populations are stable or
increasing – those occur in normal or cooler waters. This finding was
particularly striking when Adelie penguin populations in the WAP (which is
warming) were compared with populations elsewhere in the continent.
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