Barbara Wienecke

Last week I saw a headline announcing that last year thousands of emperor penguin chicks had died in the Bellingshausen Sea, when the fast ice broke out unusually early. I was deeply saddened and devastated, but not surprised.

The region where this dreadful event occurred has been one of the fastest warming areas on Earth, and as temperature records are being broken year after year, a catastrophe of this kind was a matter of time. For nearly two decades, scientists have developed models to predict the potential impact of raising temperatures on emperor penguins to establish what the future would hold for these magnificent birds.

Being cautious by nature, scientists warned that in the next few decades the global emperor population will suffer significant losses. This fate appeared a long way in the future, but it seems that the future is now.

I have studied emperor penguins for 30 years and have never stopped marvelling how they survive in an extreme, hostile environment. Many adaptations in behaviour, anatomy and physiology took thousands and thousands of years to evolve to enable them to breed in the Antarctic winter. I spent a long, dark winter at a large colony and never felt so out of place. Wrapped in many layers of Antarctic clothing (still freezing!), ungainly stumbling across the ice, I watched the emperors gracefully tobogganing over the snow-covered ice, having only each other to shelter from the vicious storms.

When the chicks hatched, I was more amazed than ever. These perfect little penguins, little fluff balls of down, depend on their parents for warmth and food for the first 50 days of their lives. Once chicks can regulate their body temperature and can hop off their parents’ feet, they grow like cabbages. Come October, their need for food is such that it takes both parents to go hunting while the chicks remain in the colony.

Most colonies occur on the land-fast sea ice that tended to provide a reliable breeding platform. The fast ice is but a thin layer on top of about 200m of icy cold, dark water….

 Barbara Wienecke, PhD is senior research scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, Hobart

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/28/emperor-penguin-extinction