Emperor Penguin's reproduction season is heavy with danger
Stefan Christmann / NaturePl.com
A rover quietly questions the prohibited freezing landscape. Suddenly, he embarked on life: he spotted an emperor penguin. With its antenna defined to scan, the 90 -centimeter robot long towards the bird, in search of a signal of an RFID chip under the skin of the penguin – recording crucial information which can finally help us understand these enigmatic species.
The penguin emperor is instantly familiar as a star of countless documentaries of nature and the Film 2005 Penguins walk. This exhibition to the media could give the impression that we have a solid understanding of its biology. We don't do it. Almost all of these images were collected from two reproductive colonies on the opposite sides of Antarctica, perhaps constituting 10% of the Emperor Pingouin population. For decades, hundreds of thousands of emperors living elsewhere along the continent's coast were practically not studied.
This situation now changes. Over the past 15 years, researchers have revealed more about these birds using new technologies, including satellites that can identify the colonies of space and robots equipped with AI to scan them on the ground. “I hope we are starting to go to a golden age of research,” says Daniel Zitterbart In Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts.
Already, the work has revealed subtle differences in the genetics and the behavior of penguins at different times around the Antarctic coast, and has shown that they are surprisingly adaptable to changing conditions. But these discoveries were made in the midst of rapid warming in the region, which led the US Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the emperors Endangered species in 2022.…
