We need to do more to protect the emperor penguin.
An international team of researchers recommends additional measures to conserve one of the most iconic Antarctic species.
Among the laundry list of alarming climate change projections is the idea that rising temperatures and changing wind patterns will negatively impact the sea ice on which emperor penguins breed.
“The current rate of warming in parts of the Antarctic is greater than anything in the recent glaciological record,” lead study author Philip Trathan, head of conservation biology at the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement.
“Though emperor penguins have experienced periods of warming and cooling over their evolutionary history,” he continued, “the current rates of warming are unprecedented.”
Some studies go so far as to suggest their populations will decrease more than 50 percent by the end of this century.
So, in these dire circumstances, scientists have proposed the “near-threatened” animals’ IUCN status be bumped up to “vulnerable”—i.e. likely to become endangered if their survival and reproduction rates don’t improve.
“We have no idea how the emperors will adjust to the loss of their primary breeding habit—sea ice. They are not agile and climbing ashore across steep coastal landforms will be difficult,” Trathan explained.
“For breeding, they depend upon sea ice, and in a warming world there is a high probability that this will decrease,” he added. “Without it, they will have little or no breeding habitat.”
Greater preservation measures, however, means better research opportunities, which hopefully means a longer-lasting species.
“Some colonies of emperor penguins may not survive the coming decades, so we must work to give as much protection as we can to the species to give them the best chance,” according to Peter Fretwell, remote sensing specialist at BAS and study co-author.
The full paper was published this week in the journal Biological Conservation.
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