The emperor penguin breeding season is fraught with hazard
Stefan Christmann/naturepl.com
A rover quietly surveys the forbidding icy panorama. Immediately, it whirrs into life: it has noticed an emperor penguin. With its antenna set to scan, the 90-centimetre-long robotic trundles in direction of the chook, looking for a sign from an RFID chip beneath the penguin’s pores and skin – recording essential data which will assist us lastly perceive this enigmatic species.
The emperor penguin is immediately acquainted because the star of numerous nature documentaries and the 2005 film March of the Penguins. This media publicity may give the impression that we now have a strong understanding of its biology. We don’t. Virtually all of that footage was collected from simply two breeding colonies on reverse sides of Antarctica, constituting maybe 10 per cent of the emperor penguin inhabitants. For many years, the a whole bunch of hundreds of emperors residing elsewhere alongside the continent’s coast have been nearly unstudied.
That scenario is now altering. Over the previous 15 years, researchers have uncovered extra about these birds utilizing new applied sciences, together with satellites that may spot colonies from house and AI-equipped robots to scan them on the bottom. “I hope we’re starting to go into a golden age of research,” says Daniel Zitterbart at Woods Gap Oceanographic Establishment, Massachusetts.
Already, the work has revealed refined variations within the genetics and behavior of the penguins at completely different factors across the Antarctic coast, and proven that they’re surprisingly adaptable to altering circumstances. However these discoveries have been made amid speedy warming within the area, which led the US Fish and Wildlife Service to declare emperors a threatened species in 2022.…
