Penguins die in second 'catastrophic' Antarctic breeding season.

Oh god -I wish there was some more optimistic news it is all so depressing.

Polar bears too. The polar bear's body requires a diet based on large amounts of seal fat. Food can be hard to come by for polar bears for much of the year. The bear puts on most of its yearly fat reserves between late April and mid-July to maintain its weight in the lean seasons.

The food-free season can last 3 to 4 months -- or even longer in areas like Canada's Hudson Bay. As the Arctic warms due to climate change, the ice pack is forming later in the season, and bears must wait longer to begin hunting again.

Females face starting their pregnancy undernourished, giving birth after a couple of months holed up in a snow cave (they don't hibernate, they stay awake, so are still using up energy) and then staying in the cave feeding their cubs, still without eating, until they are old enough to take outside. Mother could be living off her fat reserves for up to nine months. Any delay in the reappearance of the ice and seals can be fatal to her and the cubs.
wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/arctic/wildlife/polar_bear/reproduction/

Elegran Do you know how much the climate change may have affected all this other stuff, the different movements in the ice etc?

I think climate change has had a very great effect on the ice cover, Nellie, and it is likely to have an even greater effect in the near future - with devastating results far away from the Poles, too. The earth is not a series of separate compartments but a unified whole. The climate in one region affects all the rest.

I did a Futurelearn course on this, and I shall try to remember enough of it to make sense!

The interaction of different mechanisms over centuries and millenia keep the temperature more or less constant and comfortable, but with cycles due to the different mechanisms each having their own cycles. There are long cycles of how near the earth is to the sun over time, how active volcanoes are, and how active the sun is, and short ones of which bit of the earth is getting more sunlight at any one time of year, plus the effect of ocean currents and winds. That is all natural and has been going on ever since the earth began. The sum total of all the natural cycles is calculated to predict that we should at the moment be in a colder period, not the warmer wetter windier one we are experiencing.

The other very strong natural influence is the effect of the atmosphere and the amounts of the various gases and water vapour it contains. This has also gone on for millenia too, but human activity of all kinds has led to more of the"wrong" gases and more water vapour.

Some gases reflect back more of the extra heat which would otherwise disperse into space Water vapour forms clouds, which wrap the earth like a blanket and reflect back even more heat.

More heat means that more Arctic ice is lost in the annual summer melt (and Antarctic ice in their summer) and it doesn't reform so fast in the winter. Less ice means that less sunlight is reflected back up from its shiny surface and the winds blowing over the warmer waters carry more warmth to other regions.

It all works like a snowball (bizarre comparison), gathering momentum as it goes.

Should have inserted after, " Less ice means that less sunlight is reflected back up from its shiny surface", that consequently more warmth from that sunlight is absorbed into the already ice-less water.

I saw a report about the penguins. As I recall, it was too much ice that caused the problem for them this year. Whatever the cause, it's sad that only two chicks survived out of the whole population. I'll see if I can find the link.

Times article:

More than 10,000 penguin chicks in a single colony starved to death because there was an unusually large amount of sea ice in Antarctica this year, according to polar scientists.

The extra sea ice meant that the adult penguins had to travel further to forage for food for their chicks.

Only two chicks survived the breeding season in the colony of 36,000 Adélie penguins in Terre Adélie, east Antarctica. The colony is monitored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research with support from WWF, the conservation charity.

It is the second time in four years that the colony has lost almost all its chicks. The previous loss was partly a result of unusually warm weather and rain followed by a rapid drop in temperature, which meant that many chicks became saturated and froze to death.

WWF said that other colonies of Adélie penguins were faring well in east Antarctica but that they needed protection from Chinese fishing fleets, which want to target the krill on which the penguins feed.

Proposals for a new marine protected area for east Antarctica will be considered next week at a meeting in Hobart of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which involves more than 50 countries.

Rod Downie, head of polar programmes at WWF UK, said: “The risk of opening this area to exploratory krill fisheries, which would compete with the Adélie penguins for food as they recover from two catastrophic breeding failures in four years, is unthinkable.”

Good to see that other colonies of these penguins in East Antarctica are doing allright.

Re polar bears, I have been following some of the work of Dr Susan Crockford who says that most polar bear populations are doing fine and have increased in size recently or stayed steady.

Better check I've spelled her name right....yup.
Info here: polarbearscience.com

I think it was too much ice for that late stage in their breeding cycle Baggs

Yes, and the previous time it was too much cold rain after the chicks hatched. Bloody weather! (as they say around here).

I am glad I am not a penguin. All that standing around in an icy gale balancing an egg on top of your feet, waiting for your spouse to come back to do a shift of egg-sitting so that you can go off for your first meal for God knows how long, then having your precious chick soaked through and frozen and have gone through it all for nothing.