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Emperor Penguins Are in Peril Worthy of Official Endangered Status

"None of the colonies, even the southern-most locations in the Ross Sea, will provide a viable refuge by the end of 21st century."
Image: Antarctica Bound

No empire lasts forever, even if you’re the top penguin of Antarctica. After 50 years of research at the South Pole, scientists based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution now forecast that the emperor penguin’s rule of the icy continent will come to an end by 2100. The tallest and fattest of all penguins will more or less starve to death as sea ice continues to decline, courtesy of climate change.

Of the 45 colonies of emperor penguins living on Antarctica, “at least two-thirds of the colonies are projected to have declined by greater than 50 percent from their current size by 2100," said biologist Stephanie Jenouvrier in a WHOI press release. "None of the colonies, even the southern-most locations in the Ross Sea, will provide a viable refuge by the end of 21st century," she added.

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Jenouvrier conducted the study in conjunction with scientists from the Centre d'Etudes Biologiques de Chizé (French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and the University of Amsterdam. The study, released in the journal Nature Climate Change, yesterday builds upon research going as far back as the 1960’s.

Research for this study focused on the emperor penguin colony living in Terre Adélie, located in eastern Antarctica. Scientists have been going there every year for 50 years now to observe how Emperor penguins eat, mate, and raise their young. These scientists have also been tracking population growth and certain tagged individual penguins.

Here is the chart that goes with the Woods Hole study, following the decline's progression, and projected future progression, of the emperor penguin population:

This isn’t the first time the WHOI issued an “Emperor penguins in peril” alert. In 2009, the institute published a paper calculating that the Emperor penguin colony in Antartica will be 87 percent of what it is now in 2100—or in more specific terms, 3,000 breeding pairs will be reduced to a lowly 400.

The decrease in population correlates with loss of sea ice. Emperor penguins rely heavily on the ice for food—or, rather, they rely on the krill which chill in the sea ice. Krill are tiny, shrimp-like creatures that hang out in ice because inside the sea ice live the sweet, sweet algae that krill love to feast on. No sea ice means no algae, and that means no krill which, ultimately, means no more emperor penguin.

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But what about the record-setting high level of sea ice found in Antarctica in 2012? The NOAA's model of that history-making level is below:

This too is a problem.

"The role of sea ice is complicated," said Jenouvrier in the Woods Hole statement. "Too much ice requires longer trips for penguin parents to travel to the ocean to hunt and bring back food for their chicks,” aka emperor penguin parents could die on this trek and leave behind orphaned chicks who then starve to death. (What, have you not seen the award-winning documentary March of the Penguins?)

“But too little ice reduces the habitat for krill, a critical food source for emperor penguins,” added Jenouvrier, and “our models take into account both the effects of too much and too little sea ice in the colony area." In other words, emperor penguins are the Goldilocks of sea ice—they can’t have too little nor too much ice. The sea ice levels need to be just right.

So, what can be done to save these pretty penguins?

Getting them listed as an endangered species is a big goal of WHOI’s most-recent study, which declares that the emperor penguin is "fully deserving of endangered status due to climate change." For a long while, emperor penguins were labeled “least concern” by the IUCN (the organization that labels species for protection), but that changed in 2012 when their status was bumped to “near threatened.” This year, the emperor penguin is being considered for full endangered species protection, along with nine other species.

Changing the status of the emperor penguin is crucial because, once-labeled as endangered, it will put pressure on US fishing companies in the Southern Ocean to fish less. More importantly, the authors of the study write, the emperor penguin “can act as an iconic example of a new global conservation paradigm for species threatened by future climate change.”

You can see the wildlife conservation ads already: Reduce CO2 emissions or else the emperor penguin gets it.