The emperor penguin’s breeding season is fraught with danger
Stefan Christmann/naturepl.com
A rover silently surveys the forbidding ice landscape. Suddenly, he comes to life: he has seen an emperor penguin. With its antenna set to scan, the 90-centimeter-long robot moves toward the bird, searching for a signal from an RFID chip under the penguin’s skin, recording crucial information that will eventually help us understand this enigmatic species.
The emperor penguin is instantly recognized as the star of numerous nature documentaries and 2005 movie March of the Penguins. This media exposure can make it seem like we have a solid understanding of its biology. We don’t Almost all of this footage was collected from two breeding colonies on the other side of Antarctica, making up perhaps 10% of the emperor penguin population. For decades, the hundreds of thousands of emperors living elsewhere along the continent’s coasts went largely unexplored.
That situation is now changing. Over the past 15 years, researchers have discovered more information about these birds using new technologies, from satellites that can spot colonies from space to scanning AI-equipped robots on the ground. “I hope we’re entering a golden age of research,” he says Daniel Zitterbart at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts.
Already, the work has revealed subtle differences in the genetics and behavior of penguins at different points along the Antarctic coast, and has shown them to be surprisingly adaptable to changing conditions. But these discoveries have come amid rapid warming in the region, which led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the emperor. Threatened species in 2022.…
