OUR ICEBERG MAY NOT BE MELTING BUT THE WIND IS DEFINITELY TURNING!
Submitted by editor on 2 February 2015.
Get the paper! An Adélie penguin look around for an easy access to the sea from Pétrels Island. Photo by Timothée Poupart.
by Yan Ropert-Coudert
Complete breeding failure of a large number of individuals is a rare event in Nature. So when the 34 000 Adélie penguins from the colony of Pétrel Island in the Terre Adélie sector experienced a zero fledging success we believed attention had to be drawn to this catastrophic issue.
Causes for this failure were two-fold. On the one hand, sea ice around the Antarctic continent, and especially near Pétrel Island, has never been so extended. The intensive cover, coupled with the absence of opening of the polynya nearby the colony, forced parents to cover great distances between the sea where they feed and the on-land colony where they breed. These long foraging trips were pushing to their limit the fasting resistance of both the partner which stayed on the nest and that of the growing chicks. On the other hand, episodes of snow and rain in the usually dry Antarctic desert wiped out most of the few remaining chicks that are not equipped with a waterproof plumage.
Single, rare events like this one are probably not too damageable to the demography processes of the Adélie population there. However, with the risk of more acute and more frequent abrupt climatic event as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we may expect such a dire situation to occur again. In this context, monitoring efforts on this sentinel species are greatly needed.