Emperor penguins flee unsteady ice after ‘unprecedented’ failure to breed
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/emperor-penguins-flee-unsteady-ice-after-unprecedented-failure-breed
Source: By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine.
Excerpt: Antarctica's charismatic emperor penguins are thought to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, because warming waters are melting the sea ice where they live and breed. Now, the penguins have abandoned one of their biggest colonies after breeding pairs there failed to raise almost any new chicks in 3 years. Although the move cannot directly be attributed to climate change, researchers say it is an ominous sign of things to come for the largest of penguin species. Emperor penguins need sea ice that remains solid for most of the year while they find mates, breed, and raise their chicks. This requirement has become a critical problem for their second-largest colony, in Halley Bay in the Weddell Sea. Starting in 2015, sea ice there has been disrupted by powerful storms driven a particularly intense El Nino, the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that alters global weather patterns. ...from 2009 to 2018...the colony hosted between 14,000 and 25,000 adults and chicks. Since 2016, however, that population has dropped to nearly zero, ...almost no chicks, an “unprecedented” period of reproductive failure for emperor penguins.... See also New York Times article An Emperor Penguin Colony in Antarctica Vanishes [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/science/emperor-penguins-antarctica.html]
Source: By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine.
Excerpt: Antarctica's charismatic emperor penguins are thought to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, because warming waters are melting the sea ice where they live and breed. Now, the penguins have abandoned one of their biggest colonies after breeding pairs there failed to raise almost any new chicks in 3 years. Although the move cannot directly be attributed to climate change, researchers say it is an ominous sign of things to come for the largest of penguin species. Emperor penguins need sea ice that remains solid for most of the year while they find mates, breed, and raise their chicks. This requirement has become a critical problem for their second-largest colony, in Halley Bay in the Weddell Sea. Starting in 2015, sea ice there has been disrupted by powerful storms driven a particularly intense El Nino, the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that alters global weather patterns. ...from 2009 to 2018...the colony hosted between 14,000 and 25,000 adults and chicks. Since 2016, however, that population has dropped to nearly zero, ...almost no chicks, an “unprecedented” period of reproductive failure for emperor penguins.... See also New York Times article An Emperor Penguin Colony in Antarctica Vanishes [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/science/emperor-penguins-antarctica.html]