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News > Science and Tech

'Super-Colony' of Adelie Penguins Discovered on Danger Islands

  • "The sheer size of what we were looking at took our breath away," said one of the researchers with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dr. Heather Lynch. | Photo: EFE

Published 2 March 2018
Opinion

"The sheer size of what we were looking at took our breath away," said one of the researchers with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dr. Heather Lynch.

Scientists have discovered a group of roughly 1.5 million Adelie penguins, previously thought to be in decline, on the Danger Islands on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

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"The sheer size of what we were looking at took our breath away," one of the researchers with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Dr. Heather Lynch, told BBC News. The number of Adelie penguins discovered on the Danger Islands represents more than all the recorded populations in the rest of the Antarctic Peninsula region combined.

Lynch said that the discovery of the new penguin population will have "real consequences for how we manage this region," which is being considered in the designation of future Marine Protected Areas in the region.    

The discovery was made after pictures taken from space revealed large patches of their excrement.

In 2014, Lynch and Matthew Schwaller from NASA discovered guano stains in satellite imagery of the islands. To find out if the stains meant the existence of a large colony of penguins, they teamed with Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI; Mike Polito, at Louisiana State University, and Tom Hart of Oxford University to arrange an expedition.

Dr. Tom Hart told BBC News: "It's a classic case of finding something where no-one really looked! The Danger Islands are hard to reach, so people didn't really try that hard."

The discovery was published Friday in the Scientific Reports journal.

The finding is of major relevance because it shows the super-colony was able to avoid recent Adelie declines documented elsewhere on the Antarctic peninsula. Researchers think climate change and the melting of thick layers of ice have negatively impacted penguin populations, and the finding adds weight to this hypothesis because it "shows how robust penguin populations are where the ice is intact," Dr. Hart said.

Ice melting reduces krill, the penguins' main food, and allows for more detrimental human activity, especially fisheries.  

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