1.5 million new Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) was just found on the remote Danger Islands!

We often like to think that we humans have explored most parts of the world and have a good knowledge about where we find the different animals species, but every now and then we make huge discoveries that show us just how little we know.

Back in 2014, images from a NASA satellite shows something really interesting on Danger Islands; guano/poo stains from penguins. This is obviously a clear indication of penguins are living on the island, and a research team from several different universities travelled down to these Antarctic island to investigate further.

What the found when they arrived at the islands were huge amounts of Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae)! The researchers were amazed by the number of penguins they saw, and quickly figured out that it would be impossible to estimate the number from the ground.

Adélie penguins on an iceberg. Image by Jason Auch, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

This lead to drones being launched into the air to do an aerial survey of the island to collect data. This data could then be processed to estimate the population size and health of the population.

Danger Islands are a group of islands found on the Antarctic Peninsula, close to Joinville Island. When it was discovered in 1842, it got its name because it appeared among heavy fragments or ice, and the ship did not see the islands until they were nearly upon them. As you can probably guess by now - this is not an island that is very easy to travel to, so this is why this penguin colony had been undiscovered for such a long time.

Adélie penguins

Adélie penguins are as pretty common species of penguins, and are found along the entire Antarctic coast. Estimations from 2014 estimated that there are 3.8 million breeding pairs of this penguin, spread out over 251 colonies (but this obviously needs updating now).

Image by Andrew Shiva, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

These penguins mostly eat krill, jellyfish and squid, and stay away from bigger prey such as fish. They are still considered Least Concern by the IUCN Red List due to their population numbers and the amount of different colonies, but they have been considered to be a good indicator of how climate change affect the Antarctic regions. The newly discovered population on Danger Islands will further their claim as being a sustainably and healthy species, so luckily we won’t see them go extinct anytime soon.

The discoveries from Danger Islands

Once the researchers returned from Danger Islands, the real work began. All the data had to be analyzed, and once that was done, the researchers concluded with the fact that this island hosts 751,527 breeding pairs of Adélie penguins, or just above 1.5 million individuals. This is among the biggest Adélie penguin colonies in the entire world, so it is a big discovery.

An interesting observation is that the scientists to not believe that penguins to have been affected by climate change as much as the other colonies, due to the remote areas they live in. This makes the colony a perfect candidate for further study, since we now have a benchmark number “pre-population loss” to compare against.

Differences on the same island

The researchers also found the western colonies to be somewhat different from the eastern colonies, and now wish to keep studying them in order to find out why they appear different from each other despite living on the same island. They already believe it might have to do with either ice conditions or food availability, but don’t really know any details just yet.

Image by Christopher Michel, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The western part of the island has also been experiencing a bit of warming in the last years, so another theory is that this could be the reason for the difference.

Thanks for reading

I hope you enjoyed learning some more about the Adélie penguins and this new discovery. If you want to read more about these guys, check out this post from 5 months ago about the same species of penguin, but be warned, that post does not bring as good news.

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