The word is “migrated” not “extinct.” Did the NYT find thousands of dead penguins who were too stupid to move?
In the past three decades, the Adélie population on the peninsula, northeast of the Ross Sea, has fallen by almost 90 percent. The peninsula’s only emperor colony is now extinct. The mean winter air temperature of the Western Antarctic Peninsula, one of the most rapidly warming areas on the planet, has risen 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the past half-century, delivering more snowfall that buries the rocks the Adélie penguins return to each spring to nest — and favoring penguins that can survive without ice and breed later, like gentoos, whose numbers have surged by 14,000 percent.
The warmer climate on the Antarctic Peninsula has also upended the food chain, killing off the phytoplankton that grow under ice floes and the krill, a staple of the penguin diet, that eat them, by as much as 80 percent, according to a new study published this month in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But in the Ross Sea a reverse trend is occurring: Winter sea ice cover is growing, and Adélie populations are actually thriving. The Cape Royds colony grew more than 10 percent every year, until 2001, when an iceberg roughly the size of Jamaica calved off the Ross Sea ice shelf and forced residents to move 70 kilometers north to find open water. (The iceberg broke up in 2006, and the colony of 1,400 breeding pairs is now recovering robustly.) Across Ross Island, the Adélie colony at Cape Crozier — one of the largest known, with an estimated 230,000 breeding pairs — has increased by about 20 percent.
Shrinkgrow? Starvethrive? Either way, it’s a population bomb. Somebody get a flame thrower.
Steve,
what you posted says nothing about adaptation. in fact it says the opposite. Adelie’s are thriving in areas where their environment is suitable and are in serious decline where it is no longer.
BTW a large rookery of chinstrap or Adelie penguins is awesome in both sight and smell.
Migration is normally how species adapt to changes in the environment. You won’t find any Anasazi in Chaco Canyon.
Penguins die off in one place and sprout from the ground in another. Don’t you know that Steven?
Penguin seeds?
There’s that false and alarmist use of the word “extinct” again. Boo!
This is an excellent illustration of adaptation to climate change. Shifting range is adaptation. Climate shifts, habitat shifts, species shift. Just imagine how many times this has happened in just the last million years.
It is also a great mythbuster. Climate change is bad. Except where it makes it good, like these new penguin habitats, for two species.
A change is as good as a rest, as they say. Is the scenery boring there?
Do they taste like chicken?
Well, I’ve never eaten seal, but I believe they eat fish. Sea ducks and seal is avery, very dark, oily, and strong tasting meat. People say it tastes fishy. I expect that penquin is similar. Great if you are used to it. Utterly revolting if you are used to a tasteless chicken boob.
If they had tasted good the early explorers and whalers would have wiped out these tooo easy to kill birds.