Charcot Island Penguins – an update

Map Source: Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty

In this post and this one too, I repeatedly comment that the LTER cruise “discovered” a penguin colony on Charcot Island, beneath the northwest buttress of Mount Monique. I was basing these statements on a map we were using on the ship. I am not quite sure where that map came from or when it was made, but it showed a probable adelie colony on the north coast of Charcot Island beneath Mt. Martine (near Cheeseman Island). As a result, when we (LTER scientists) documented penguins beneath Mount Monique, we thought that we had found another adelie colony. Well, it turns out that the map from the ship was inaccurate.
In fact, the Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty has recieved an ASPA (Antarctic Specially Protected Area) proposal from the British Antarctic Survey, available online here, to protect Charcot Island because of its isolation and relatively few visits by people. In the ASPA proposal, an adelie colony of about 60 individuals was observed in 1976 is shown to have been in the location we observed adelies during our 2009 LTER cruise in January. It would logically follow then, the adelie colony observed on the 2009 LTER cruise was the same colony observed by the BAS more than 30 years earlier.

Map Source: Sectretariat of the Antarctic Treaty

The map provided in the ASPA proposal (above) seems to correlate well with what was observed on our cruise. Furthermore, although I don’t know for certain, I seem to recall that we observed fewer than the 60 adelies (as counted in 1976) in the colony this year. If this is true, this would indicate that perhaps the decline of adelie populations isn’t due to migration to other foraging areas, but rather due to a reduction in breeding or perhaps something else? I am not a penguin expert, so this is all speculation, but the story is quite intriguing. My girlfriend Elizabeth covers this a bit more in our personal blog, So Civilized.

Its also worth noting that the above mentioned ASPA proposal which appears to have been written in 2006 indicates that all previous reports indicate the island has not been approached from the ocean. If this is true, this would make Kristen and Rick the first people to gain access to Charcot Island by boat. Despite the success of such an endeavor undoubtedly being the result of the rapid warming here in the western Antarctic Peninsula, this is pretty cool for them. So, a benefit to the melting ice of the Antarctic is access to more of land – great. Let the drilling begin…