Antarctic penguins are breeding up to three weeks earlier in response to climate change, a new study says. The study published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology was led by Penguin Watch at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University.
The decade-long research concludes that these changes threaten to disrupt penguins’ access to food, increasing concerns for their survival.
“We are very concerned because these penguins are advancing their season so much, and penguins are now breeding earlier than in any known records,” the report’s lead author, Dr Ignacio Juarez Martínez, told The Guardian newspaper.
“The changes are happening so fast that the penguins could end up breeding at times when their prey is not available yet,” he said.
“ This could result in a lack of food for the penguin chicks in the first weeks of their life, which could be fatal,” he said.
The researchers examined changes in the timing of penguin breeding between 2012 and 2022, focusing on the period from their “settlement” at a colony, as in the first date at which penguins continuously occupied a nesting zone.
Three species – Adélie (Pygoscelis adeliae), chinstrap (P antarcticus) and gentoo (P papua) – were studied, with colony sizes ranging from a dozen nests up to hundreds of thousands of nests.
Read The Guardian HERE
The study can be accessed HERE
