What Happens When Emperor Penguins Lose Their Ice

0:00 Emperor Penguins are running out of ice faster than expected. What happens when your entire life depends on ice and that ice disappears before your chicks can survive? That's not a future scenario. That's already happening to Emperor Penguins. This is the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, your weekday Ocean news update. If you care about staying informed on the Ocean every weekday Monday to Friday, hit that follow button right now so you don't miss the next story. Emperor penguins have one of the most rigid breeding cycles in the animal kingdom. They have courtship, which is during the Antarctic winter; egg laying, which is from May to June; And then males incubate the eggs for about 65 days without feeding.

0:47 Chicks hatch in the coldest conditions on earth and everything depends on one thing. Stable sea ice lasting eight to nine months. If that timing breaks, the entire reproductive cycle fails. Imagine having that rigid of a reproductive cycle. That is insane. That is crazy to think about you know how you depend on environmental circumstances, the environmental stability, and we are at a time where an environmental stability is that it's lowest. We're seeing changes happen each and every day. Now think about this. You have a male. He does everything he needs to do to court his woman.

1:27 His court, his mate, he's trying to go in, he is trying to buddy up with her. He is trying to like hang out, you know, they mate for life. So this is the one that he wants for the rest of his life. On the females side, that's the female penguin that wants this male penguin for the rest of their life. They walk together, they go through the whole motions, and they breed and they have an egg. And that incubation period takes a long time. And it all depends on how cold and how warmer things get. But if it gets too warm or if the wind pattern is off or the snow doesn't come, or things don't happen the way they're supposed to happen, or you get more extreme storms, then that can throw off the entire cycle. Think about when you don't feed for that long, 65 days.

2:11 I go two hours without food and I go crazy. Imagine going 65 days without food. That's an energy cost that is very demanding on the body to just stand there and sit on an egg or make sure an egg does not hit the ice. Imagine what that would do. Compare it to somebody, like a flexible breeding species that will actually have the ability to change and be able to handle change. This is just not gonna go well for this breed, this species. If it fails, everything fails. That's a lot on this poor species. That's a lot on someone an animal, a species that lives. And the freezing cold for most of the year.

2:54 Emperor penguins just don't need ice. They need fast ice. They need sea ice attached to the continent. So they need the strongest ice. It's not just ice floats. They need the strongest ice just to be on the safe side. And you're probably gonna be like, why do they need that? Because it provides stability for breeding colonies. These are massive breeding colonies. It keeps chicks safe from Ocean predators 'cause the Ocean predators that they face are in the Ocean. Orcas, leopard seals. We went through them the last couple of episodes. If you haven't listened to those, go to the last couple of episodes of a previous two days and you'll be able to hear about orcas and leopard seals. And of course they need stabilized 'cause it lasts long enough for chick development. Recent studies have shown that fast ice is now forming later.

3:38 And it's breaking up earlier and it's becoming less predictable. That's not a good thing for a species that demands that stability for the environment and for its land. Imagine just kind of like walking around and all of a sudden the land is just gone underneath you. It just collapses. That's really, really bad. And I think when you lose that ice, that rapidly freezes, like that fast ice. That pack ice eventually that's there for life apparently, but not anymore. It starts to decay and it starts to go down. And I think that's really what's happening here and that's what we're seeing a degradation of, and a decrease of. And that's scary. That's really scary.

4:19 Now, before satellites, we had limited colony monitoring. And I feel like now with the satellites we're starting to see more. And I think there's been some really cool thing. High resolution satellite imagery tracks the colonies near real time. I believe it was Michelle La Rue, Dr. Michelle LaRue on the podcast a number of years ago. She's a great scientist. She now lives in New Zealand. She studies penguin. She studies Antarctic colonies essentially. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I remember from the interview there were about four colonies they believe of emperor penguins that were sitting there in Antarctica. And then they were like, they notice it. Basically, they look at satellite imagery of the scat profiles. So when you have a dense population of emperor penguins, they're gonna poop and they're gonna poop all in and around that area. And that poop stains the ice. And that poop can actually be seen from a satellite in space.

5:02 That's how much they poop. And so when they looked around, they saw that it's not four colonies. They actually saw 22 very densely circled scat marks, poop marks. And they were able to track that there were actually 22 populations. I don't know. This was a long time ago. This was in the mid 20 teens. I don't know if they're right there anymore. But when you start to have high resolution satellite imagery that's tracking these colonies almost in your real time, depending on when you get the pictures, they can detect whether colonies are failing or not. So failure events that are happening across Antarctica. And so in 2022 to 2024, research showed that the key finds what multiple colonies experienced complete breeding failures.

5:43 An early ice breakup caused a hundred percent chick mortality in some of those regions. That's how scary we are seeing this change happen. In two years, we saw multiple colonies experience complete breeding failure. In some areas there were a hundred percent chick mortality. I'm saying it twice for a reason. It's not just a gradual decline, it's a sudden system failure. These are not species that can handle change. We already established that. And they're seeing change constantly. And so you look at like 22 colonies and now it's probably less than that. That's a scary thought and it's not gonna get better.

6:24 How do we save these? I have no idea. We have to stop climate change to save these. This is not something that is going to help these populations. Recent modeling studies showed that up to 90% decline of emperor penguin populations by 2100. That's less than a century away, less than a century away, even under moderate emission scenarios. Why is this happening? Because small changes in ice timing equals massive reproductive loss. Penguins have low ability to relocate quickly. There's not much place to go, folks. It's really just a situation where you have to be where you have to be. The ice is melting around you and you're getting smaller, smaller areas, and these colonies are big.

7:04 You have more competition for sites, and until these colonies disappear, start disappearing more, that's when you're gonna have a little bit more room. But even then, it's not even gonna be that much room. And then the recovery rates are pretty slow. So that doesn't help either. It just doesn't happen. When you have a species that's long lived, it takes a while for it to reach sexual maturity. You start to get a slowdown in the population recovery. And so when you have a slow down in the population recovery and you have all these changes happen to a species that doesn't like change, you start to see a drastic decline in their population. Now, Antarctica, when you look at the ice and how it's being affected by climate change, Antarctica is experiencing increased Marine heat waves. So that's warmer Ocean temperatures and reduce sea ice extent.

7:46 So when you have a heat wave, that's where the water is being hot. Not just at the surface, but pretty far down. And then when the ice is at the surface and you have warmer water, it's gonna melt. That's just the way it goes. It melts. And you're not gonna have ice for very long after that. It's really sad. Like people keep talking about how climate change is not that big of a deal, and it bothers me so much because they have no idea what's going on. They have no idea what's going on. In 2022 and 2023, record low Antarctic sea ice levels were observed. And it was directly linked to colony collapse events. That's how bad we are. That's in a situation where we're seeing heat waves really changing the entire planet.

8:27 We're seeing a hundred degree Fahrenheit sea surface temperature in Florida. We're seeing rapidly increasing intensity of hurricanes in the North American continents. And then of course, we're seeing typhoons and cyclones doing the same thing. Because the water's warmer. And so that difference in pressure that it provides, we get some more intense storms. It's really what it comes down to. And then of course when you have heat that melts ice, you're getting more fresh water in the system. And that disrupts how salt water flows and what's capping the salt water, and how that's gonna affect circulation in the long, long term. It's not good, folks. I don't mean to be depressed. I don't, but this is just frustrating because we're hearing this all the time.

9:07 And then when you have emperor penguins, which are canaries in the coal mine, essentially they're sentinel species, which means that they signal a broader ecosystem health. If they fail, ice dependent krill systems may also shift. Krill is being massively overfished in Antarctic. We're seeing a change in their population, a decline in their population. But then we also see like, you know, for emperor penguins, like a predator prey dynamics that will change and a southern Ocean stability that will be affected because of climate change and because of this lack of ability to hold populations and to keep stable essentially. And so when we see krill fisheries declining, we're seeing whales decline and we're seeing climate change affect that, it's just, it's a negative loop that we continue to see happening over again.

9:53 And here's the hard truth. You can't create sea ice and you can't move entire colonies that depend on ice very easily. But you can protect feeding areas. And you can reduce additional stress like fishing and disturbance. And then you can push for climate mitigation. We can do all of these things. That's what we can do. That's what we have that ability to do that by pressuring our governments to change. In 2022, emperor penguins were proposed for protection under the Endangered Species Framework in the US. Emperor penguins. But the protection without climate action has its limits. And even now we're seeing less protection of endangered species. We're seeing less protection of things that are affecting the US and affecting other places.

10:35 Even in Canada, we're probably gonna start to see changes in that as well. We're seeing changes in how DFO manages things in the environment because of pipelines, because of fossil fuel development and so forth, because the world is changing politically and economically to be frank. And it's all being driven by this lack of science knowledge by this push for greed for money and just lack of scientific understanding of things that can help us in the future. And it's really a lack of intelligence all the way around. And I think it's a scary thought. It really is a scary thought. Now scientists are watching out for certain things. So researchers are focusing on identifying certain climate refugia areas where ice can persist for longer.

11:16 So areas, whether that's actually gonna be colder or not longer. There may still be areas like that. Scientists are gonna be tracking colony movement. They're gonna be looking at monitoring adaptive behavior. That's gonna be really important. But the key question is, can Emperor penguins adapt fast enough? Cause right now the data suggests that it's not. And I think that's a scary thought. It really is a scary thought, and it's not gonna stop until you and I act, until we start engaging and electing our government representatives, our government officials that will act for climate change, not for big business, not for fossil fuels. Not for chemical companies, not for the companies that will just wanna make money.

11:56 This is for you who wants to survive, for you who wants to see the world do well and the world be taken care of. When we look at the final kind of thoughts here, emperor penguins are not just losing the habitat. They're losing the timing that makes their survival possible. That's really what it comes down to. And when that timing breaks, the system's gonna break. And it's gonna be an overall break and something that we need to work on to act. Now tomorrow we're gonna be covering ice and glaciers and pack ice and so forth in Antarctica and how it's doing and where we're at. But this is really important. We've covered three different types of species this week. Orcas, leopard seals, as well as emperor penguins.

12:36 We found there's not a lot of information on these species. The information we do have does not suggest growth. It suggests decline maybe other than the orcas, but it also a lot of lack of understanding. And in a time where we need a lot of environmental understanding. We have the technology and we know what works and we have the solutions and we're just not enacting them. It's a very frustrating time to be someone who is for the Ocean. And I think that's kind of sad. It's frustrating. If you wanna learn more and you want to know more about Antarctica, what it's like to work in Antartica and the work that's being done. I have an interview coming up on Friday. We're talking to Ocean Networks Canada that just went down there this year in February I believe. And they did a bunch of work. They installed some monitoring systems to basically data acquisition systems in Antarctica. We're gonna hear all about what's like to work and the challenges and everything like that that goes into it, and how to work in Antarctica.

13:21 It's gonna be a lot of fun. But this one, I'm sorry that it wasn't like a better episode. I wanted it to be more fun, but just the research that I found is just not fun. It's is not fun in the poles. And the Southern pole is no different than the North Pole, in this case. So, but if you wanna learn more, follow How to Protect the Ocean so you don't miss what's happening tomorrow and the day after that. I want you to follow. I want you to learn 'cause that's the best way to start moving and start acting for the Ocean, is to learn about the Ocean. So thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you tomorrow and happy conservation.