As ice melts, emperor penguins march toward extinction

As ice melts, emperor penguins march toward extinction



First, a black dot appears in the distance. More dots join, forming meandering lines across the newly white icescape.

“Then all of a sudden, you hear the first calls,” photographer Stefan Christmann says. That’s when it really hits him: “Wow. The birds are coming back.”

It’s late March in Atka Bay, in Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land, nearly 2,700 miles southwest of the southern tip of Africa. Christmann has been waiting more than two months for theemperor penguins—the biggest of all penguins, standing about four feet tall and weighing up to nearly 90 pounds—to return from foraging at sea.

His plan is to stay with the Atka Bay colony’s roughly 10,000 penguins through the winter, for the second time. He spent the winter here five years ago and has come back to complete his chronicling of the emperor’s breeding cycle—something few, if any, wildlife photographers have done. With temperatures falling to at least 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (45 degrees below zero Celsius) and shrieking blizzards that cut visibility to a few feet, the Antarctic winter is not for the faint of heart—especially during July and August, its coldest months.

“To be quite honest, you get used to it after a while,” Christmann tells me matter-of-factly.

What the emperor penguins won’t easily get used to is diminishing—and possibly disappearing—sea ice, which provides a stable breeding platform and base from which they can hunt for food in surrounding waters.

Despite being superb swimmers, adult emperors in the 54 colonies around Antarctica—some 256,500 breeding pairs—must nurture their chicks out of water on the sea ice before spring comes and the ice melts. Antarctic sea ice is highly variable, but five years ago it suddenly declined, with record shrinkage in 2017, according to a study published last year in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

Sea ice may now be recovering, but it still remains below the long-term average, and climate models predict continued significant losses by century’s end unless urgent action is taken against climate change.

emperor penguin male huddling
Male emperor penguins at the Atka Bay colony, each with an egg balanced on his feet, huddle to endure the two-month polar night. Females, after mating and laying the eggs, have returned to the sea to feed. Huddling is so tight that the birds can steam when they break apart, as if they’d stepped out of a sauna.

“Under a business-as-usual scenario, emperor penguins are marching towards extinction,” says Stéphanie Jenouvrier, a seabird biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Her team’s research indicates that if carbon emissions remain unchecked, 80 percent of the emperor colonies could be gone by 2100, leaving little hope for the species’ survival. Average global temperature is on track to increase by three to five degrees Celsius (5.4 to nine degrees Fahrenheit) by then, but if the rise can be kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), Jenouvrier says, perhaps nearly 20 percent of colonies would be lost, while the Ross Sea and Weddell Sea populations, potential emperor penguin refuges because of more favorable sea ice conditions, would increase slightly.

With the sea platform in place and the Atka Bay penguins settled in, Christmann sets about capturing the scene as they begin a brand-new turn of their life cycle. An elegant courtship unfolds as penguins pick that year’s partner. A brief and awkward copulation follows, as the males do their best not to fall off.

Afterward, the penguin partners stick together, mirroring each other’s movements. Their close bonds will help ensure their chick’s survival—it’s the only one they’ll have that season. One day Christmann notices a pair peering at a snowball carefully balanced on the female’s feet. He guesses they’re a first-time couple practicing their egg-balancing skills.

By the end of May, the first eggs appear, one per female. Laying has come at a physical cost, so the hungry female carefully passes her egg to her mate and gets ready to leave. The partners will test the strength of their bonds as the females return to sea to feed.

emperor penguin hatching
In late July, tiny claws, an eye, and a clump of damp feathers become visible as a chick begins to break through its shell, a process that can take hours. All the while, the father repeatedly peeks under his feathered brood pouch to monitor progress.

emperor penguin bonding
To survive on the ice, a growing chick needs to maintain strong parental bonds. Beak to beak, a parent feeds its chick small, frequent meals. Between mealtimes, the parent constantly looks down to preen and check on the chick, reinforcing their bond.

For the males left behind, winter closes in. In 100-mile-an-hour winds and plummeting temperatures, the birds huddle to share body heat. Such cooperation keeps the dads and their precious eggs alive, as do the males’ body reserves—there’s nothing to eat, and they’ll lose almost half their weight before the females return. On the coldest days the penguins fall silent, saving as much energy as possible. All Christmann hears is the eerie sound of their feet scraping over the ice.

Through the six-month-long winter, Christmann and 11 others are the only humans in this part of Antarctica, huddling themselves in a small German research station perched on the ice shelf above Atka Bay. In all but the worst of storms, when the humans stay inside, it’s a snowmobile ride down the steep escarpment and onto the sea ice to be with the penguins.

In late July the polar night ends, and soon the rising sun greets new voices in the colony. If their mothers don’t get back in time with food for their young, the chicks get their first meal from their father—gooey milk from his esophagus. But after enduring the winter, not all the males have been successful. Christmann sees one picking up a dead, frozen chick and balancing it on his feet. “He took the chick and walked towards the colony, acting as if everything was normal.” It was “heartbreaking,” Christmann says.

emperor penguin chicks huddling
Huddling etiquette is a survival skill all young emperor penguins must learn. Instead of waiting their turn to reach the warm center, impatient chicks will often jump right in. “It’s just a big mess,” photographer Stefan Christmann says. “But a really cute mess.”

Females return just when their starving partners need them most. Pairs reinforce their bonds. Mothers see their chicks for the first time and take over feeding duties. For months, parents form a tag team, taking turns to fetch food for the growing chicks. Around September, both parents must go fishing together to satisfy ever hungrier mouths, leaving the chicks to hang out in crèches.

The youngsters learn to huddle, not always neatly. A few nestle together, then others race up and slam into the pile. As the huddle grows, latecomers try pushing in—“right in the warm portion of the huddle,” Christmann says.

Sometimes lone parents stay behind and watch over the crèches. Christmann sees an adult with two chicks. Although only one belongs to the caretaker, the bird reaches down and feeds them both. An accident? Maybe not. Adult emperors frequently perform a ritual of lifting their brood pouch, a feathery flap of skin, to show others their newborn. It’s unproven, but Christmann thinks it’s possible that the parents do this to form close bonds, becoming guardians to each other’s chicks and helping out with childcare.

emperor penguin chicks socializing
Chicks tussle while keeping warm on their parents’ feet. After the mothers return to the breeding grounds, they share babysitting duties with their partner so the birds can take turns feeding on fish. Parents that stay behind often stand together, allowing chicks to interact.

Toward year’s end, the chicks are nearly as tall as their parents, but they aren’t out of danger. Before the sea ice melts, the chicks must swap their gray down for waterproof, adult feathers; otherwise, they’ll drown. This happened in 2016 at the Halley colony, when a storm broke up the ice before October and the chicks were still in their crèche period. Since then the ice hasn’t been stable enough to support adults, leading to almost complete breeding failure, with no chicks successfully reared. That colony—previously Antarctica’s second largest—is now mostly abandoned. The storm coincided with the strongest El Niño event in 60 years, the kind of extreme weather pattern that’s expected to become more frequent. Counts of penguins in satellite images are under way to gauge how much the birds have been affected by the recent changes in sea ice losses around Antarctica. The results likely will be a warning sign for the future of the species.

emperor penguin waterproof feathers
Before they can swim, emperor penguin chicks must replace their gray, fluffy down with an impenetrable covering of rigid black and white feathers. Adults molt as well, renewing feathers that have taken a battering in the extreme conditions of Antarctica.

Back at Atka Bay, the sea ice begins melting at the end of December, earlier than expected, and Christmann sees molting adults and chicks clambering to safety atop the higher ice shelf—an extension of the much thicker terrestrial ice—using a pile of drifted snow as a ramp.

A month later, he watches the last full-grown chicks leap from the shelf some 15 to 30 feet into the sea. “It looks spectacular,” he says.

emperor penguin climbing clope
Penguins wait in line to make their way up the sea ice to the more stable ice shelf. Using their beaks as ice picks and their claws as crampons, they can be surprisingly good climbers when they have to be. As sea ice begins to melt earlier each season, heading for the high ground of the ice shelf is one way emperor penguins buy time to grow in their new set of feathers before they head to the sea.

emperor penguin spring blizzard
A spring blizzard sweeps in as the chicks begin exploring the ice with newfound independence. In two months the fledglings will grow waterproof feathers and swim off. Five years later they’ll return to rear their offspring—if the waters of Atka Bay continue to freeze in winter.

Elsewhere in Antarctica, emperor penguin colonies won’t have this option to survive the early disintegration of their sea ice haven. Many ice shelves are simply too high for waddling penguins to climb. Even if they make it up, the ice is scarred with deadly crevasses, and there’s no shelter from the punishing winds.
“I’m worried about them becoming the new polar bears,” Christmann says, referencing those famous denizens of fast-shrinking Arctic sea ice.

It was never going to be easy for Christmann, spending a year on the frozen continent, leaving his loved ones behind, but the emperor penguins kept him going. “There’s this bird that cannot fly, that walks funny, that always looks grumpy, and this bird shows you how it’s done,” he says. “They are able to live through the harshest of conditions, and it would be us who send them over the edge. I would feel very, very sad about that.”

emperor penguin jumping cliff
After weeks of waiting, a penguin leaps off an ice cliff into the sea. The dive “looks spectacular,” Christmann says. “But it shouldn’t be that way. They should slowly glide into the water from the sea ice.” It could become an increasingly common sight as climate change threatens to erode Antarctica’s seasonal sea ice and more penguins are forced to take the risk of clambering onto dangerous ice shelves to complete their life cycle. “They’re having less and less time with the stable sea ice,” Christmann says.

Lead Image Source: Photograph by Stefan Christmann

This article  was written by Helen Scales, who divides her time between Cambridge, England, and the French coast. She’s written five books about the oceans. Stefan Christmann won the 2019 Wildlife Photographer Portfolio of the Year Award for his work on emperor penguins.  The article was first published by National Geographic on 14 May 2020.


What you can do

Support ‘Fighting for Wildlife’ by donating as little as $1 – It only takes a minute. Thank you.

 

payment

 

Fighting for Wildlife supports approved wildlife conservation organizations, which spend at least 80 percent of the money they raise on actual fieldwork, rather than administration and fundraising. When making a donation you can designate for which type of initiative it should be used – wildlife, oceans, forests or climate.

 

Dive in!

Discover hidden wildlife with our FREE newsletters

We promise we’ll never spam! Read our Privacy Policy for more info

Supertrooper

Founder and Executive Editor

Share this post with your friends




Leave a Reply

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

1 Comment