Myriads of Penguins
Quantifying Abundance at the Poles
What you notice first is light, a wide shaft piercing the powdered sky and plunging into an ice-clogged sea. Below, a humped shadow spouts and flashes a curved tail. Walruses wave their tusks, half-concealed in darkness, and puffins crowd stolidly onto an ice floe while a flurry of cross-shaped specks, Australasian gannets, plunge into the froth below the black cliffs. Above them rises a cloud of white wingbeats. Hundreds of thousands of gulls fill the air above the continent, while two warships with bulging sails lean perilously into the waves below the wretched peaks.
The scene currently hangs on the wall of the National Maritime Museum in London. Entitled HMS Erebus and Terror in the Antarctic, it was painted by James Wilson Carmichael in 1847 to celebrate the voyage of English explorer James Clark Ross to the uncharted Antarctic peninsula in the austral summer of 1842. The dramatic composition conveys the sublime dangers and the wonders of an expedition to the Pole, and it also advertises the biological fecundity of the yet-uncharted continent. Wilson’s composition highlights the dual purpose of Ross’s mission: to claim new territory on behalf of the British Crown and to scout out prospective grounds for the British whaling fishery.
In the mid-19th century, “great numbers” of whaling ships began prowling the cold waters of the sub-Antarctic––so many, in fact, that Ross observed that “constant accidents were happening in the thick fogs which prevail, by running foul of each other.” In his report, later published as A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, Ross dutifully chronicled his crew’s whale sightings. “Hitherto, beyond the reach of their persecutors,” he noted, “they have here enjoyed a life of tranquility and security; but will now, no doubt, be made to contribute to the wealth of our country, in exact proportion to the energy and perseverance of our merchants; and these, we well know, are by no means inconsiderable.” His zoological notes include frequent encounters with penguins, even a comment that the birds, “notwisthanding the disagreeable dark colour of its flesh and extreme fatness, where found to make an excellent soup.” On the 11th of January, 1841, giving his coordinates at 71º 56’ S., 171º 7’ E., Ross wrote:
We saw not the smallest appearance of vegetation, but inconceivable myriads of penguins completely and densely covered the whole surface of the island, along the ledges of the precipices, and even to the summits of the hills, attacking us vigorously as we waded through their ranks, and pecking at us with their sharp beaks, disputing possession; which, together with their loud coarse notes, and the insupportable stench from the deep bed of guano, which had been forming for ages, and which may at some period be valuable to the agriculturists of our Australasian colonies, made us glad to get away again, after having loaded our boats with geological specimens and penguins.
Myriads of penguins: one might as well write acres of penguins, or cities of penguins. It’s not a particularly precise piece of data, but perhaps Ross was overwhelmed by sheer numbers. There’s something magnificent about the sturdy refusal of those many birds and their pungent guano. Ross may have named the islands on which he found those penguins “Possession,” but he failed to dispossess the innumerable inhabitants already dwelling there, even as he took a few aboard his ship for future study and, perhaps, consumption.
On the other side of Antarctica, the world’s most abundant bird colonies are crowded on a single collection of islands roughly the size and shape of Long Island, New York. Located in the southern Atlantic Ocean, the island of South Georgia is home to thirty-three different nesting species, twenty of which have populations numbering in the millions. When Captain James Cook undertook the first documented visit to the island, he counted birds and seas and whales in incredible quantities, and decided that he hated it. “Cook called South Georgia the most despicable place on the planet,” says Matt Messina, a naturalist and guide for the luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent. “He wrote that he doubted any human would find it necessary to go back there or want to, ever again.” Rather than enlivened by the abundance of birds on the island, Cook was repulsed.
For his work aboard one of the sixty tourist ships that make passage to Antarctica, Matt has taken tourists to South Georgia, a “mecca for wildlife nerds,” for the past three seasons. In that time, he’s realized that there’s a limit to what humans can conceptualize in scale. “Imagine there’s one king penguin, and a lawyer from LA who’s never been outside their own backyard to look at birds,” he explains. “They get all excited. If they see a hundred penguins, they get more excited. But by the time you see a thousand versus ten thousand versus half a million birds, you’ve hit a level that you can’t wrap your head around. You can stand and look at millions of a species, and your brain sort of checks out.” Even explorers such as Ross, whose journalistic style veers toward an enthralled rather than a clinical stance, couldn’t help but feel repelled by some of the abundance at the Poles. The scenery was wonderful up to a point; then, it became overwhelming. Their reactions suggest that our human senses can only apprehend the sublime for so long before it exhausts us and collapses into the abject.
Perhaps the sensory overload of such an experience can’t be conveyed in simple terms, or even image. Watching Planet Earth from the comfort of one’s living room doesn’t quite convey the assault on the senses — the stench of regurgitated krill and acrid guano, the blinding sunlight on white ice, the whip of salt air and spray — that made expeditions to the Poles a feat of endurance rather than a pleasure cruise. Just think about the words we commonly use to convey immensity of scale: a sea, and ocean, a mountain. All of these terms are from the natural world, but none of them describe animal populations. The ones we do––swarm, flock, herd––still don’t provide an image more precise than “many.” A group of penguins can be called a “waddle” or a “raft,” but conceiving either of these terms to the millionth degree is impossible.
As a conservationist, Matt adds, our inability to comprehend huge masses of species “should be a point of alarm.” It goes beyond the sense of the sublime that was captured by landscape painters of the time for their London audiences. “Looking at an abundant population, you think you’re seeing a healthy, thriving group of individuals, but you have no idea what the trends are doing,” says Matt. He references the demise of the passenger pigeon as an example. “Why were millions of birds healthy, but hundreds of thousands dooming? You don’t know the factors that go into keeping that population stable. How can you say it’s a rule that penguins come back year after year, when you have new colonies popping up?” Matt calls it a cultural inability to understand abundance, not unlike the difficulty of considering a group and an individual at the same time. “Some penguins know the safety of the colony and never want to leave their comfort zone. Other penguins will abandon their life in search of something better.” It’s fair to say that we know less about penguin societies than we do about human societies. But by figuring out why penguins choose to live in the places they do, we’ll learn more about the patterns and phenomena that guide their decisions.
In 1842, the second year of Ross’s voyage, the Terror nearly ran aground on a cluster of islands concealed under thick ice. Situated in the mouth of the Weddell Sea gyre, a swirling current that spits out pack ice year-round, the islands––dubbed by Ross the “Danger Islands”––are mostly inaccessible by boat and thus to the tourists who visit the Western Antarctic Peninsula. But in 2014, researchers using Landsat imagery spotted signs of guano on the surface of the rocks. Suspecting that the penguin population of the Danger Islands might be of a significant size, an international team was dispatched to scout the area with ground surveys and drone imagery. They returned with a number: seven hundred and fifty-one thousand, five hundred and twenty-seven nesting pairs. Even without counting juveniles, that’s one million, five hundred and three thousand and fifty-four penguins — making the Danger Islands host to both the third- and forth-largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world. The Danger Island Adélies constitute more than half the number of Adélies in the entire Antarctic Peninsula.
On average, adult Adélie penguins weigh ten pounds and can grow to 27 inches in height. If all of the Adélie penguins currently living on the Danger Islands formed a single-file line, tail-to-beak, and aimed north, they would overshoot Tierra Del Fuego by twenty miles. They are, to put it mildly, a plethora of penguins. Why so many, and why here? Alex Borowicz, one of the researchers involved in the study, frames it this way: because the Danger Islands are surrounded by ice year-round, they’ve become a refuge for species such as Adélies, who feed on the krill under sea ice. “It’s a cultural distinction,” Matt adds, a behavior specific to Adélie penguins. Gentoos and chinstraps — fellow brush-tailed penguins who’ll munch on krill in the open sea — have remained in the ice-free waterways of the western Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Sea. In human terms, a “colony” typically means that the settlement is far from its indigenous landbase. Using the term for other animals serves as a reminder that they, too, make decisions that lead them far from home.
How does our relationship to a place change when we think of it as home? Carmichael’s painting of the Ross expedition portrays a world of drama, turbulence, and disaster. Although the warships in the scene are small, they offer the suggestion of a human scale that plunges the rest into dizzying proportion. One has to wonder how the same composition would have been rendered had its scope focused instead on the walruses, the birds, and the whales: all of whom are at once at home and, to different degrees, visitors from other places. Practicing these different frames of reference––the mammalian, the invertebrate, or even the botanical and geological––could restore to our abject impressions a sense of the sublime. And for guides like Matt, that’s important not just for providing guests with a life-changing experience, but to help them better understand the far-reaching impacts of climate change and species extinction.
From the point of view of the Antarctic ice sheet itself, hardly a nanosecond has passed since Ross sailed back to London in 1843. But just four years later after his return, the same year that Carmichael’s painting would be finished, both the Erebus and the Terror began a new mission: to find and navigate the Northwest Passage under the command of a captain named Sir James Franklin. Not all polar explorations ended well, and Franklin’s remains one of the most notorious failures. It took two years for the British Admiralty to launch its first rescue of the Franklin Expedition, and Ross himself was sent on the the first of these voyages. But the catastrophe that had befallen Franklin and his crew would remain unknown. They remained there for nearly one hundred and seventy years, while the ice sheet in which they were encased was claimed first by Great Britain, then by Canada, ratified as the Northwest Territories in 1870 and later as Nunavut in 1990. Search parties gave way to research trips, and still, the boats would wait. Then, in 2014, an Inuit man named Sammy Kogvik would lead a crew of researchers to a rotting mast locked deep in the ice, closing a hundred and sixty-nine year-old case. And a few months later, a crew of researchers would land a dark rubber Zodiac on the edge of an icy expanse on the other side of the world. They would plant their feet in the gravel and look up into a shrieking throng of flapping flippers and regurgitated krill, a monochrome tide rising as far as the eye could see. They would have found penguins upon penguins upon penguins, each disputing possession: inconceivable myriads of them.
