{"id":30981,"date":"2012-06-20T20:04:12","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T00:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetsave.com\/?p=30981"},"modified":"2012-06-20T20:04:12","modified_gmt":"2012-06-21T00:04:12","slug":"emperor-penguin-population-may-collapse-by-2100-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/articles\/emperor-penguin-population-may-collapse-by-2100-video\/","title":{"rendered":"Emperor Penguin Population May Collapse By 2100 (VIDEO)"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
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The Emperor penguin, Antarctica’s iconic, nearly 4-foot-tall sea bird, is likely to see its populations collapse as warming and ice loss in Antarctica accelerates. According to a new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), the Emperor penguins living in Terre Ad\u00e9lie, in East Antarctica, will eventually disappear if the presently occurring warming and loss of ice continues along with increasing rates of sea level rise<\/a>. Which, according to nearly all research done on the matter, is likely to not only continue, but rapidly accelerate.<\/p>\n

“Over the last century, we have already observed the disappearance of the Dion Islets penguin colony, close to the West Antarctic Peninsula,” says Stephanie Jenouvrier, WHOI biologist and lead author of the new study. “In 1948 and the 1970s, scientists recorded more than 150 breeding pairs there. By 1999, the population was down to just 20 pairs, and in 2009, it had vanished entirely.”<\/p>\n

The study authors think that the decline of those penguins is likely connected to the simultaneous decline in Antarctic sea ice in that region.<\/p>\n

Emperor penguins are dependent on sea ice — they breed and raise their young almost exclusively on it. With the loss of that ice early in the breeding season, massive breeding failure may occur.<\/p>\n

“As it is, there’s a huge mortality rate just at the breeding stages, because only 50 percent of chicks survive to the end of the breeding season, and then only half of those fledglings survive until the next year,” Jenouvrier says.<\/p>\n

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The disappearance of sea ice also affects the penguins’ food source. “The birds feed primarily on fish, squid, and krill, a shrimp-like animal, which in turn feeds on zooplankton and phytoplankton, tiny organisms that grow on the underside of the ice.”<\/p>\n

With the ice loss, there will also be a loss of plankton, causing damage all the way up through the food web, potentially starving the different species that penguins rely on as prey.<\/p>\n

To project how the penguin populations will do in the future, the researchers used data from many different sources, “including climate models, sea ice forecasts, and a demographic model that Jenouvrier created of the Emperor penguin population at Terre Ad\u00e9lie, a coastal region of Antarctica where French scientists have conducted penguin observations for more than 50 years.”<\/p>\n

Mixing this long-term population data with information on climate is the key to the study, says Hal Caswell, a WHOI senior mathematical biologist and collaborator on the paper.<\/p>\n