LSU Professor Joins Global Effort to Study Penguins
At 50 hours on an airplane, you’ve traveled the distance of the world. You’d think we’ve probably seen all this planet has to offer, right?
Actually, wrong. It’s only recently that one of the largest penguin populations in Antarctica was discovered.
Michael Polito is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at LSU. He still remembers what it was like to visit this population on the Danger Islands — a remote group of tiny islands along the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Looking back on it, Polito said, “In 2006, I had the chance to visit one of the islands and was amazed by the sheer number of Adélie penguins I saw. The water around the island boiled with penguins. But with only two hours on land, it was impossible to estimate the size of the population before sea ice conditions forced us to leave.”
But leaving the island was just the beginning.
Fast-forward to 2014. Heather Lynch, an Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, analyzed satellite imagery from the same area, and she discovered there might be similarly sized colonies on some of the surrounding Danger Islands. As she puts it, “I thought, ‘Holy cow, there are not only colonies, but huge colonies, of some sort of penguin. How did we miss this really obvious thing?’”
And so, these discoveries led to the creation of a team. Polito and Lynch gathered researchers from Oxford University, Northeastern University, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to return to the islands in 2015. The team used quadcopter-based aerial photography and high-resolution satellite imagery to get the first ever count of penguins on all of the Danger Islands.
The final number? Drumroll, please…
751,527 penguin nests — more than the rest of the entire Antarctic Peninsula region combined. And as there are two adult penguins associated with each nest this means the total number of penguins on the Danger Islands is more than 1.5 million!
Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution, noted that this first-ever count offers a valuable benchmark that may help protect both the islands and its penguins. It could help researchers understand how and why climate change affects these species. “The population of Adélie penguins on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice conditions over there? Food availability? That’s something we don’t know,” said Jenouvrier.
Tom Hart, a researcher at Oxford’s Department of Zoology, also sees significant value in these findings. He and his fellow researchers believe the colonies deserve special consideration in the creation of the Antarctic Peninsula marine protected area. Hart speaks up for the islands, saying “The size of these colonies makes them regionally important and makes the case for including them in the area.”
Polito shares the same intrigue that Jenouvrier and Hart have for these findings: “The results of our study indicate that not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change.”
The road ahead remains open to new discoveries and colonies. And LSU’s Michael Polito is inspired to find answers, and to represent the Tigers in these expeditions. It Just Means More opportunities to discover some of the world’s largest penguin super-colonies, and help protect them for generations to come.
