Voices from Antarctica 5: Waiting for Emperors

Emperor penguin researchers are waiting for tagged birds to return, and an elderly radar system sheds light on a very windy part of the atmosphere.

A team of NIWA researchers spent a month with a couple of thousand Emperor penguins at Cape Crozier on Ross Island, in Antarctica, during November 2019.

They were hoping that high-tech data loggers glued to the birds' backs would shed some insights into their journeys and feeding habits out at sea amongst the pack ice.

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The Cape Crozier emperor penguin colony is being studied by a NIWA team as part of the Ross Sea research and monitoring programme, known as Ross RAMP. The programme is monitoring the effectiveness of the very large Ross Sea marine protected area.

The team, led by Gitte McDonald from the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, attached video cameras and biologging data tags to 19 breeding birds to study their foraging at sea: where they were going, how often they dived and what they were eating.

Unfortunately, five of the tagged birds didn't come back before the researchers had to leave; these birds included four of the five birds carrying video cameras.

The tags that were retrieved revealed that individual birds travelled to quite different locations - four went east from the colony, but some went west around the northern tip of Ross Island.

The longest foraging trip was 18 days, and in that time the bird travelled at least 250 kilometres in each direction, although its overall journey would have been much further than that.

It was also diving frequently in search of food - as well as many shallow feeding dives it made regular dives to more than 250 metres, when it was probably feeding on the sea floor.

Gitte says this is the first time that Emperor penguins from Cape Crozier have been studied in detail and they are making some of the longest feeding trips and deepest dives recorded for the species.

The adult bird can put on two kilograms in weight during a trip, and feeds most of that to its rapidly growing chick which needs to be fully feathered and independent by the time the sea ice where the colony is situated breaks up.

Long-term monitoring of the atmosphere

Adrian McDonald and colleagues from the University of Canterbury maintain an MF radar at Arrival Heights, near Scott Base, that allows them to gain insights into one of the windiest parts of the atmosphere…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details