PARIS: Emperor penguins shed all their feathers annually, a precarious ritual which will have change into lethal as local weather change pushes them into shrinking patches of Antarctic sea ice, researchers stated Wednesday (Feb 25).
The flightless birds moult throughout summer season, counting on saved fats to outlive for a number of weeks till their mackintosh grows again to allow them to swim and hunt in icy waters once more.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, analysing seven years of satellite tv for pc photographs, by accident found a number of moulting colonies alongside the extraordinarily distant shoreline of an space referred to as Marie Byrd Land.
As sea ice melted, the penguins had been compelled onto smaller areas in more and more giant and tightly packed teams, the UK polar analysis organisation stated in an announcement.
In 2025, solely 25 small teams of penguins had been seen within the satellite tv for pc photographs, it stated. Previous to 2022, greater than 100 teams had been noticed in the identical area.
“Whereas we do not know for positive what occurred to these penguins, we all know they’ll discover new appropriate breeding websites after ice loss, so it is potential they’ve established new moulting websites elsewhere,” stated Peter Fretwell, lead writer and mapping knowledgeable on the British Antarctic Survey.
“But in addition it is potential that vast numbers of penguins perished after coming into the Southern Ocean earlier than that they had changed their waterproof feathers,” Fretwell stated.
“If this has occurred, the state of affairs for emperors as a species is even worse than we thought.”
The researchers stated that if emperor penguins are compelled into the ocean earlier than their feathers are changed, they face exhaustion from elevated power use, hypothermia and elevated danger from predators.
