Emperor penguins at risk as ice melts
Posted on | January 27, 2009 | Comments Off
Story From Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
Emperor penguins, the waddling stars of the 2005 movie March of the Penguins, could face extinction by 2100 as Antarctic sea ice melts because of global warming, a study reported Monday. The study, the first to link climate change with this penguin species, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Antarctic sea ice is projected to melt as greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels warms the atmosphere. “Sea ice is essential to the emperor penguin life cycle, as the animals use it to breed, feed, and molt,” the authors write in the study.
The scientists, led by Stephanie Jenouvrier and Hal Caswell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, based their sea-ice projections on 10 computer models used by the 2007 United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
If sea ice shrinks in Antarctica as the models predict, authors say an emperor penguin colony in Terre Adélie, Antarctica, would decline from its peak of 6,000 breeding pairs in the 1960s to about 400 by 2100. Study co-author Caswell, a Woods Hole biologist, says researchers believe that would qualify as a “quasi-extinction,” based on the 95% or more population decline.
But last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to list the emperor penguin as an endangered species. In an online report, the service wrote that “review of the best available scientific information found no significant threats to the current survival of the emperor penguin.”
Caswell and his co-authors say that “to avoid extinction, emperor penguins will have to adapt, migrate or change the timing of their growth stages.” But unlike other Antarctic bird species, emperor penguins have historically seemed slow to change, they note.
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