Jan. 20: All About Penguin Food



Today’s picture: Adelie penguins taking a break on a small piece of ice.



Jan. 20, 2011

Now that we have tested and run the vehicles successfully we are trying to concentrate on running missions where the penguins are foraging for food. 

At this point we are working closely with the birders and watching where the tags that they place on the penguins are showing up on the satellite map. 



Our project is specifically looking at the Adelie penguin since their population has declined so rapidly over the past couple of decades. 

Each individual penguin has different foraging habits, so the changes in climate down here can benefit one species and not the other. Since the birders are tagging different species, we need to make sure that we are concentrating on the where the Adelie’s have been foraging and to send our remotes diving to the depths that they are diving. 

Each penguin has a tag on its back that sends a signal to a satellite when the penguin is at the surface taking a breath. As soon as we wake up, we look at the tag locations from the day before and then plan out a mission to go look at the location where the penguins were feeding.  For the most part, they have been foraging locally and in Palmer Canyon, where we ran yesterday and the day the ship came in close. 

I got a question from someone about penguin eggs and chicks that I didn’t really know yesterday so I asked around. The question was “Why do some penguins have multiple eggs as opposed to one.” The short answer is that no one really knows, but emperor penguins incubate their eggs on their feet and under the “stomachs” so it is only possible for them to hold one egg. 

The other species can lie down and incubate two eggs, which increases the chances of one chick surviving. There is a lot more in-depth material here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110119141721.htm

http://coseenow.net/ross-sea/2011/01/out-comes-the-science-equipment

Today, we went out and dropped the vehicle in the water and made sure it was running OK.  We went back and ate lunch and then planned a short mission to test out the leaky vehicle -- one  that would also give us a view of what the water column looked like between the local (ocean) sampling stations. 

There are a series of stations in Antarctica that have been set up and studied for years at different locations. Since these stations are repeatedly sampled and studied, there is a good data set that can be referenced to see how things have changed over time. 

The mission we ran today connected the dots between these stations to see how different the water column was between the stations. We were helping other scientists who were taking water samples there this morning. 

Although they have water samples from one station they don’t have a picture of what the surrounding water looks like, which is what were going to provide. These station can change due to local topography, bathymetry, proximity to glaciers and also the open ocean.

We made it about half way through the mission and the vehicle leaked again, so we brought it back and took it apart and tried changing some o-rings on the vehicle. We still had some good data that we will pass on, though. 

We put the vehicle back together to do a run tomorrow.  While we were doing this we were also keeping an eye the other vehicle.  After eight hours in the water, it finished up and we went out to pick it up after dinner. The batteries that we were testing earlier in our visit seem to be doing really well and we haven’t had to worry about them running out during the longer missions.

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