A new study has shown that Emperor penguins don't restrict themselves to one breeding location every year. This finding is in sharp contrast to the earlier belief that said that these penguins were tied to a single breeding location and would return to it year after year.
LaRue is the lead author of this study along with the researchers from the University of Minnesota. It will be published in Ecography, a professional journal publishing research in spatial ecology and biogeography.
These researchers from the University of Minnesota were tracking penguin colonies for over three years and in this time span they observed six instances of penguins' relocation. This basically means that the Emperor penguins
have shown that they are willing to relocate their nesting grounds in response to climate change.
Further, "March of the Penguins" a documentary film featured by a group of researchers who studied the penguins for over 60 years largely found decline in size of penguin population in recent years.
Earlier, it was believed that Emperor penguins had the philopatric behavior because of which they returned to the same breeding grounds annually, so in the first place the decline was attributed to reduced survival rates. But later it was found out that the reduced number may simply be due to the fact that now not all of the penguin population sticks to a single location for breeding. This new discovery was strengthened by the satellite images of new colonies.
"Our research showing that colonies seem to appear and disappear throughout the years challenges behaviors we thought we understood about emperor penguins", says UM researcher Michelle LaRue.
In recent years, there have been very serious concerns that retreating sea ice caused by climate change could be affecting the colony that breeds on it but the satellite image being used nowadays as a research tool has helped relieve the researches.
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