Scientists discover new colony of penguins from space

More than 60 emperor penguin colonies live off the coast of Antarctica, but more than half of them would have remained undiscovered had they not been spotted from space.

Satellite imagery revealed 33 of the 66 groups, tracking bird droppings, which are brown and easier to identify when they stain large areas of sea ice.

A new colony of about 500 penguins has been discovered at Cape Verleger, West Antarctica.

It’s a whole lot of development considering this species is likely to be seriously threatened as the frozen continent continues to warm up.

Emperor penguins are known to be vulnerable to melting sea ice, their favorite breeding ground, and if this continues, the animal population will suffer greatly. Current climate models predict that 80 percent of the colonies will be “quasi-extinct” by the end of the century.

This is when a population can be doomed to extinction, even if there are still individuals alive.

Even under the best-case scenario, with global temperatures rising by just 1.5°C, experts say the emperor penguin population will decline by 31 percent over the next three generations.

Dr. Peter Fretwell, British Antarctic Survey: “This is an exciting discovery. New satellite imagery of the coastline of Antarctica has allowed us to discover many new colonies. While this is good news, like many of the newly discovered objects, this colony is small and located in a region that has been hit hard by the recent loss of sea ice.”

For the past 15 years, British Antarctic Survey scientists have been looking for new penguin colonies by looking at satellite imagery.

Emperor penguins require sea ice to breed and are located in areas that are very difficult to study as they are remote and often inaccessible and temperatures can reach as low as -60 degrees.

Dr. Fretwell and his team studied images from Sentinel 2, one of the Earth observation satellites of the Copernicus program. They were then compared with high resolution images from the MAXAR WorldView3 satellite.

Previous discoveries of emperor penguin colonies show “gaps” between them, leading scientists to suspect that groups prefer to stay at least 100km apart.

Although it is impossible to count individual penguins from orbit, experts

can estimate the number of colonies by the size of the concentrations of birds.

In 2020, researchers also used satellite mapping images and found that there are 20 percent more penguin colonies in Antarctica than previously thought. They discovered 11 new emperor penguin colonies, three of which had previously been identified but never confirmed. There were an estimated 265,500 to 278,500 breeding pairs on the continent.

However, the researchers warned that most of the newly discovered colonies were located on the fringes of the breeding range, in places that are likely to be lost as the climate warms.

Christina DENISYUK.

Photo: Christopher Walton; Maxar Technologies