Antarctic penguins’ breeding season is changing at an ‘alarming’ rate, decade-long study finds

Penguins in Antarctica are changing their breeding habits at record speed to escape rising temperatures caused by climate change, a decade-long study has revealed.

But the study was published Tuesday in the Journal of Animal Ecologywhich focuses on three species of penguins, suggests that different species are adapting at different speeds depending on their traits and vulnerabilities.

winner and loser species

Ignacio Martínez, a biologist at the University of Oxford who led the study, said the findings suggest there may be “winners and losers of climate change”, in terms of which species may adapt more to warming conditions than their peers. Martínez’s team studied gentoo, Adélie and chinstrap penguins.

Gentoos, a more temperate species that can eat fish in addition to krill and live near their nesting grounds year-round, appear to be winning the race to adapt. Their breeding season showed the most variation, shifting an average of 13 days earlier.

“When we looked at a 10-year time series back to back, we realized, hey, this is the fastest change we’ve ever seen in any vertebrate,” said Martínez.

“The change is massive.”

Meanwhile, chinstrap and Adélie penguins depend on krill for their diet and migrate hundreds to thousands of kilometers throughout the year. They recorded a variation in the breeding season of an average of 10 days.

Martínez’s team used a network of 77 time-lapse cameras to monitor three penguin species in Antarctica. They studied 37 colonies of penguins spread across the vast Antarctic Peninsula and surrounding islands.

The painstaking observation was important because it allowed scientists to observe three species of penguins that live close to each other, all facing global warming that is three times faster than the rest of the world.

What does this mean for the future of penguins

On the one hand, the researchers say, it’s remarkable that the penguins are adapting so rapidly to the changing climate in the 10 years of their data collection.

But on the other hand, different rates of adaptation for different species means that they may begin to conflict with each other over land and food.

Martínez said the Gentoos seem to be dominating, establishing new colonies and expanding their numbers while the other two are in decline, not a good picture for the future of the penguins overall.

“If only one (species) survives, then … we will only have one species to survive in the next change,” he said.

“If we only have one species, the chances of survival of the species are very small.”

Beyond penguins, the big picture

Although penguins are changing their schedules at the fastest pace, they are not the only species changing their breeding and migration patterns with climate change.

a search Published last week in Nature Communications Data were compiled on 75 bird, mammal and reptile species around the world and the timing of activities such as egg laying over the past 15 to 25 years. It found that, on average, they were shifting these movements earlier, and this was happening faster in species living closer to the poles.

On average, a species’ population did not change as they changed the timing of their migration and reproduction, said Victoria Radchuk, senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Zoo and Wildlife Research and lead author of that study.

“They’ve actually allowed the population to remain stable in its numbers on average, which is a good sign,” she said. With those time changes, it appears that “species are able to adapt to the changing climate.”

The penguin study has not yet been able to determine how changes in breeding season are affecting penguin populations of different species, but it is something that Martínez and his colleagues want to consider further.