Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Turns out Polar Bears are not the only animals which do just fine in low sea ice conditions.
Foraging behavior links sea ice to breeding success in Antarctic penguins
Yuuki Y. Watanabe, Kentaro Ito, Nobuo Kokubun and Akinori Takahashi
Science Advances 24 Jun 2020:
Vol. 6, no. 26, eaba4828
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba4828Population trends and breeding success variability of Adélie penguins, a bioindicator of Antarctic environments, have been attributed to changing sea-ice extents; however, causative mechanisms remain unclear. By electronically tagging 175 penguins in four seasons with contrasting sea-ice conditions, we show that ice-free environments enhance, not deteriorate, foraging efficiencies and breeding success. In an ice-free season, penguins traveled by swimming rather than walking, leading to larger foraging areas, shorter trip durations, and lower energy expenditure than three ice-covered seasons. Freed from the need to find cracks for breathing, dive durations decreased, and more krill were captured per unit dive time, which may also be associated with phytoplankton blooms and increased krill density in the sunlit ice-free water. Consequently, adult body mass, chick growth rates, and breeding success increased. Our findings explain the regional population trends and demonstrate a key link among sea ice, foraging behavior, and reproductive success in this iconic species.
Read more: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaba4828
Who could have predicted that extensive sea ice conditions which make it harder to get to food would make life difficult for penguin populations?
Update (EW): h/t Martin C, Murray Grainger – Changed the top picture from Emperor Penguins to Adelie Penguins.
Penguins should move from Antarctica to the Arctic where the ice is disappearing at an alarming rate.
There they will grow fat and happy because NOT ONLY THE ICE IS DISSAPEARING BUT THE POLAR BEARS ALSO.
Except the polar bears will eat them.
What if a male and female Polar Bear wound up somehow floating to Antartica on some flotsam, was completely natural and wound up getting established there? I know…the odds are low. Probably wouldn’t be healthy for the Penguins. But there are six different species of seal that live in Antarctic waters: Ross, Weddell, crabeater, leopard, fur and elephant seals. Fur seals are the smallest, with adult females weighing only 150kg, while male elephant seals can weigh 4,000kg. The elephant seals might put up a good fight with a Polar Bear. They would probably do fine in Antartica but might be confused a little with these Penguins.
What if a male and female Polar Bear wound up somehow floating to Antarctica on some flotsam, was completely natural and wound up getting established there?
It’d be a pretty bad case of inbreeding…..
Wrong Andre, Polar Bears are thriving, check the posts by Dr. Susan Crockford. For example:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/19/polar-bears-and-climate-scares-the-real-truth-behind-the-issue/
I’m pretty sure that was sarcasm.
The thing with really excellent sarcasm is that it is subtle, so they can never be quite sure. You want to keep your target audience slightly off balance.
Minor item to mention on the picture vs. the penguins in the study – the study talks about Adelie Penguins, but the picture is of Emperor penguins . . .
They taste the same 🙂
Ask a polar bear
Yeah you got me 😉
I thought the Emperor penguins had the longest of walks across the sea-ice then land to get to their nesting area.
“which may also be associated with phytoplankton blooms and increased krill density in the sunlit ice-free water”
These guys are off the page! Great for them, its about time a little reasonable comment entered the science of the poles. Great find thanks.
With a tuxedo like that the shouds call Ubear Eats and have the food delivered.
damned if you do……damned if you don’t
…it’s goldilocks
I THINK PENGUINS SHOULD MOVE FROM ANTARTICA TO THE ARTIC WHERE THE ICE AND THE POLAR BEARS ARE DISSAPEARING AT AN ALARMING RATE.
THEY WILL GROW FAT AND HAPPY HERE IN SOCIALIST CANADA………. AND IT SHOULD PLEASE TRUDEAU BECAUSE THEY HAVE A BLACK FACE.
So Global cooling is a pain in the ass for everyone then. Indeed who would have thought?
bbbbbut, isn’t is caused by warming?
So now the climate models will be adjusted to ensure than more CO2 leads to more sea ice?
“Who could have predicted ”
Certainly not the climate scientists.
Is there a rebuttal from the sharks and killer whales?
Watched this film quite often when it got hot. Demonstrates how far the emperor penguins have to walk every year to get to water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-p9ma2Y1QQ
– JPP
I bet, the climate clowns will found some fake disaster to happen due to those nasty healthy penguins (and their growing population) in order to fulfil their narrative.
Something like :
“It’s worse than we thought : CAGW will cause more penguins to die in the 2 next decades, new study say.”
Actually, I think there was a claim a little while ago that more penguins = more penguin poop = more ice melts. Can’t remember where I saw it though, probably a BBC propaganda piece.
Coffee is bad for you. Coffee is good for you. Science doesn’t know squat.
Many people posting don’t grasp sarcasm.
are you being ………………….sarcastic?
we could dress the scientist to look like a penguin and have them assess the hazards of sea ice relative to orcas
This sounds like a dark matter tanker ship spill that happened around Neptune.
Now we need a robot from the year 3000 that is 40% Titanium, 40% scrap metal, 40% nickel, 40% Dolomite, 40% Iron, etc crash land near the penguins and have to rest it’s language matrix.
That was a hilarious Futurama episode — actually making fun of enviro-kooks. The dark-matter ship had 1000 layers of hull, and someone lamented “If only it had 1001 layers!”
Polar conditions are difficult for ANY creature to deal with, even those adapted to it.
From the study:
“Climate models predict a rapid reduction in the Antarctic sea-ice extents over the 21st century (32), despite the opposite long-term trend currently being observed.”
Boom! Japanese scientists… dropping those red pills lol!
What a great worthwhile bit of research.
Omigoto.
But penguins are on a slippery slope and marching towards extinction.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/06/as-ice-melts-emperor-penguins-march-toward-extinction-feature/
The above national geographic article has more fancy pictures so must be better than Eric’s article.
With the ice melting, wouldn’t you expect a ‘slippery slope’? Maybe they can slide to the water, instead of having to walk… /sarc off
Sorry, this is the environment they evolved in, so just more bs spewed by morons.
If you go to the NSIDC web page:
https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
and click on “Antarctic” then select a year and click on the annual curve near its winter maximum in September-October, you get a pop-up map showing ice coverage coloured by percentage of ice. Even at the winter maximum, there is plenty of pale blue 80-90% ice (i.e. 10-20% open water) along the coast. I don’t see the penguins having an issue unless we get into serious global cooling.
They survived the Pleistocene glacial periods without going extinct, so we can assume that these earnest researchers have seriously underestimated the ability of penguin colonies to move to be close to where the open water is.
Since the article doesn’t mention climate change, it’s fair to also assume that they are just biologists doing their job. Or perhaps they embarked on a project to show how “disappearing” Antarctic ice was going to be the death knell for penguins; found that their results did not support the message of doom, and had the integrity to report their work without adjustment to fit the narrative.
The Madagascar Penguins said it best when confronted by endless snow and ice:
“Well THIS sucks…”
Those are Emperor penguins, not Adelie penguins
Thanks, updated.
You could have used this one of Adelies in the WUWT media library. TAKEN BY ME!
Eeek 🙂
So cute! Could they be raised in a temperate climate, or would you have to get Galapagos penguins?
I may or may not be your friend, but the Internet is.
not sure if we have adelie but we do have penguins in aussie zoos
Fairy penguins live on granite island near Victorharbour in Sth Aus
went there once person with us was asking wheres the penguins?
my response
cant you SMELL them already…
cute but pongy buggers
theyre also on phillip island nothers? ofVictorian coast
Fish breath….
Wanna’ buy a penguin harvesting license?
Apply with xi credentials.
Regarding Antarctic polies – Sir Terry Pratchett had a story:
“Supposing you’d watched the slow accretion of snow over thousands of years as it was compressed and pushed over the deep rock until the glacier calved its icebergs into the sea, and you watched an iceberg drift out through the chilly waters, and you got to know its cargo of happy polar bears and seals as they looked forward to a brave new life in the other hemisphere where they say the ice floes are lined with crunchy penguins, and then wham! Tragedy loomed in the shape of thousands of tons of unaccountably floating iron and an exciting soundtrack … “