Meet the penguins
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© Christine FlareauMore Pickle
A 13-year-old male who requires some experience in nest building! Last year he chose a nest spot on the edge of the colony as the centre spots are hard to get. Despite this, he withstood the snowstorm.
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© WWF-Aus / Chris JohnsonMore Snowdrop
A 13-year-old female who has a usual nest spot with her partner of many years. They take it turns to incubate the egg in the nest they’ve built.
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© WWF-UKMore Polo
A 13-year-old female who is likely to breed this year. Last year, she managed to raise two chicks in a well-built nest.
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© Natalie Bowes / WWF-CanadaMore Flappy
A 13-year-old female who is missing part of her flipper. She seems to have a different partner this year and a well-built nest.
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© WWF-Aus / Chris JohnsonMore Splasher
A 13-year-old female who was not seen this year. She could be out monitoring the field or might have skipped a breeding year.
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Things can change fast in Antarctica
Things can change fast in Antarctica
Climate change is complex. While disappearing sea ice poses a threat to penguins, Adélie penguins in east Antarctica were recently hit by the opposite problem – there was too much sea ice. This meant they had to travel further than usual to reach their usual feeding grounds and took longer getting back.
Coupled with several days of freezing rain at a critical period – a very rare occurrence in what is officially classified as a polar desert – conditions for rearing young were poor. Chicks’ downy feathers are not waterproof, and not a single chick from a colony of 30,000 adult pairs survived the 2013-14 breeding season.
Our work
We’re working with French polar scientists at Dumont D’Urville Station in east Antarctica and we support important research by CNRS, the French Antarctic Programme. We’re monitoring the foraging habits of the penguins, using miniature GPS devices fitted while the females are incubating to track their movements and identify key “biological hotspots” in the Southern Ocean where they feed.
Together we’re trying to predict how the Adélies might adapt to climate change, and we’re strongly supporting an international proposal to create a large-scale marine protected area to safeguard their feeding grounds off east Antarctica.