Chinstrap penguins are exquisitely adapted to their
environment. They live and breed in some of the world’s harshest
conditions, nesting in the windblown, rocky coves of the Antarctic
Peninsula, a strip of land comprising the northernmost part of the
frigid continent. In water they are precision hunters, darting after
krill, the tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that are their sole food source,
utilizing barbed tongues engineered for catching the slipperiest of
prey.
On land, these 2-2.5-foot-tall flightless birds are prodigious
mountaineers, able to scale rocky escarpments in spite of their ungainly
waddle. Their perfect adaptation to local conditions makes them the
ideal barometer for the future of the region. If anything changes in the
marine environment, the health of chinstrap penguins will be one of the
most reliable indicators. They are the canaries of the Southern Ocean.
And these endearing, black and white emissaries from Antarctic waters are starting to disappear.
Scientists conducting a chinstrap census along the Antarctic Peninsula
have discovered drastic declines in many colonies, with some seeing
population reductions of up to 77% since they were last surveyed, about
50 years ago. The independent researchers, who hitched a ride on a
Greenpeace expedition to the region, found that every single one of the
32 colonies surveyed on Elephant Island, a major chinstrap outpost, had
declined.
Overall, the island’s total chinstrap population had dropped
by more than half, from 122,550 breeding pairs in 1971 to 52,786 in
January 2020. “Such significant declines suggest that the Southern
Ocean’s ecosystem is fundamentally changed from 50 years ago, and that
the impacts of this are rippling up the food web to species like
chinstrap penguins,” says Heather J. Lynch, associate professor of
ecology & evolution at Stony Brook University in upstate New York,
who designed the study.
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