More than 60 colonies of “emperor penguins” live off the coast of Antarctica – but more than half of them would remain undiscovered if they were not observed from space.
Satellite imagery helped detect 33 of the 66 groups, tracking bird feces or guano, which are brown and easily identified when stained with large patches of sea ice.
The 66 new colonies include about 500 penguins that have just been discovered at Cape Verleger in West Antarctica. This is a welcome development considering the species is likely to be seriously threatened as the frozen continent continues to warm.
Emperor penguins are known to be vulnerable to the loss of sea ice, their preferred breeding habitat, and if this continues to decline, numbers will be severely affected.
Current climate models predict that 80% of the colonies will be “nearly extinct” by the end of the century.
This is the time when their number can be doomed to extinction, even if there are still living individuals.
Experts say that even under the best-case scenario, with global temperatures rising by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), emperor penguin populations will decline by at least 31 percent over the next three generations.
Dr Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey, a wildlife researcher from space and lead author of the study on the discovery of this new colony, said: “This is an exciting discovery. New satellite images of the coast of Antarctica have allowed us to find many new colonies.”
While this is good news, like many of the newly discovered sites, this colony is small and in an area that has been severely affected by recent sea ice loss.
Emperor penguins need sea ice to breed and live in areas that are difficult to study as they are remote, often inaccessible and can be exposed to temperatures as low as -76 degrees Fahrenheit (-60 degrees Celsius).
Dr. Fretwell and his team studied images from the European Commission’s Sentinel 2 satellite, one of the Earth observation satellites involved in the Copernicus program.
Scientists discover new colony of penguins space https://t.co/7xHQSknYtG
– Daily Mail UK (@DailyMailUK) January 20, 2023
These images were then compared and confirmed with high resolution images from the MAXAR WorldView3 satellite.
Previous discoveries of emperor penguin colonies show gaps between them, leading scientists to suspect that groups like to stay at least 60 miles (100 km) apart. While it’s impossible to count individual penguins from orbit, BAS can estimate colony numbers from the size of the bird population, as the new discovery puts the figure at 500.
And in 2020, BAS researchers once again used satellite map images to prove that there are 20% more penguin colonies in Antarctica than previously thought.
They discovered 11 new colonies of emperor penguins, three of which had previously been identified but never confirmed.
At the time, there were an estimated 265,500 to 278,500 breeding pairs on the continent.
However, the researchers warned that most of the newly discovered colonies were located on the fringes of the emperors’ breeding range, in places that are likely to be lost as the climate warms.
Source: Daily Mail
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