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Species Spotlight: Adelie Penguin
Adelie penguins aren’t landing leading roles on the silver screen like their cousins, the emperor penguins, but they are getting attention of a different sort—as the poster children of global warming.
Named after the wife of a 19th-century French explorer, these eight-pound, two-and-a-half-foot-tall birds nest on the rocky beaches of Antarctica in dense colonies during September and October.
With about 2.5 million breeding pairs, Adelie penguins are one of the most abundant penguins in the Antarctic. But their numbers are dropping in the warmer, more northerly parts of their range. Scientists suspect the continent’s rapidly rising temperatures—increasing at least five times faster than the world average—affect the krill upon which the penguins feed. To survive, krill need the plankton and algae stored in pack ice, but this ice is no longer reliably forming each year in their spawning grounds by the South Shetland Islands. Without it, the new krill die and the penguins lose their food source.
To make matters worse, two giant icebergs that have broken off the ice sheet now stand between the penguins' breeding colonies and their feeding grounds, forcing them to walk an extra 30 miles. This is no easy feat for a flightless bird that manages about a mile an hour over land.
For this cold-climate creature, stopping global warming is essential—or these tuxedo-clad penguins could end up all dressed up with nowhere to go.
