A pair of emperor penguins resting on Antarctic sea ice/Sergio Pitamitz/VWPics/AP
2023.08.26 Sat posted at 18:30 JST
(CNN) Rapidly warming planets are devastating Antarctic sea ice, threatening the very existence of emperor penguins.
According to a report published in the scientific journal Nature on the 24th, a survey of emperor penguin colonies inhabiting the Bellingshausen Sea on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula revealed that four out of five colonies had all their chicks wiped out last year. Do you get it. The region had lost an enormous amount of sea ice that year.
It was the first time a “catastrophic breeding failure” of this magnitude had been recorded for an emperor penguin. It supports the dire prediction that more than 90% of emperor penguin colonies will become “near-extinct” by 2100 as the world warms.
The research team used satellite imagery from 2018 to 2022 to study the numbers of individuals during the breeding season in five emperor penguin colonies consisting of 630 to 3,500 mating pairs.
As a result, it was found that in 2022, it is highly likely that not a single chick survived in the four colonies.
Emperor penguins need stable sea ice connected to land to nest and raise their chicks. Eggs are laid from May to June, and the hatched chicks develop water-resistant feathers and become independent around December to January.
But in 2022, the sea ice broke up earlier than usual, and in some areas it had completely disappeared by November. Every year around this time, satellite images showed black masses on the ice, but all of a sudden there were none.
A leopard seal takes a nap on a small iceberg this March
If the sea ice breaks too soon, the chicks will fall into the ocean and drown, said study co-author Norman Ratcliffe, a seabird biologist at the British Antarctic Regional Observatory. Or they may be washed away on drift ice, separated from their parent birds, and die of starvation.
Ratcliffe warns that penguins in the area are experiencing a “mass extinction.” The catastrophic reproductive failures observed in Antarctica in the past have been sporadic and low in incidence.
Over the past few years, experts have sounded the alarm about the depletion of Antarctic sea ice.
In February, when Antarctica was at its peak summer, sea ice fell to unprecedented levels. Even in mid-winter, when sea ice would return in a normal year, conditions continued to fall far short of expected levels. In mid-July, Antarctic sea ice was the lowest for this time of year since records began in 1945, 2.6 million square kilometers below the 1981-2010 average. This was an area comparable to the land of Argentina.
For emperor penguins with nowhere else to go, this is especially devastating, says Ratcliffe. When the emperor penguin fails to reproduce, it adapts by moving to another location. But that is not possible if the entire breeding ground is affected.
Between 2018 and 2022, 30% of the 62 Antarctic emperor penguin colonies known to researchers were affected by partial or complete sea ice loss, according to the report.
Cassandra Brooks, an assistant professor of Antarctic species at the University of Colorado at Boulder who was not involved in the study, said, “There is no evidence to support the possibility of emperor penguin extinctions directly attributable to the loss of sea ice as global warming occurs. The number is steadily increasing,” he said, expressing a sense of crisis, saying, “The chances of ensuring the survival of emperor penguins are dwindling.”
Another study published last year found that 65% of Antarctic’s native species, led by emperor penguins, could disappear by the end of the century if the world fails to curb fossil fuel pollution, which contributes to global warming. I expected to be deaf.
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2023-08-26 09:30:00
