UD researcher part of effort to study Antarctica's penguins

Jan. 14, 2012  |    

Matthew Oliver, assistant professor of oceanography at the University of Delaware, poses with Gentoo penguins in Antarctica. / COURTESY OF DONNA PATTERSON

Written by MOLLY MURRAY

The News Journal

Oliver looks at a satellite image of an island off the western coast of Antarctica that shows the area where the penguins he studies are being tracked. / THE NEWS JOURNAL/BOB HERBERT

An Adélie penguin. / SAMUEL BLANC PHOTO -->

Matthew Oliver speaks live with Travis Miles, a graduate student at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Science, about the current conditions in Antarctica. Miles is working on the joint research project and is based at Palmer Station area. Oliver was in Antarctica last year.

THE NEWS JOURNAL/BOB HERBERT

From a research lab in Lewes, oceanographer Matthew Oliver zooms in on an island off the western coast of Antarctica to check on the Adélie penguins he studies.
"See those pink spots?" he asks. "That's krill scat."



It's a sure sign that these penguins, which feed on krill, have been on this little patch of land recently. Scat is a polite word for penguin poop, and krill gives it a pink cast. Lots of penguins mean lots of pink on satellite images of the normally white and slate gray landscape.
Oliver, an assistant professor of oceanography at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and the Environment, is tracking the plankton, krill and penguin food web along with salinity, water temperature and chlorophyll levels in this part of Antarctica as part of a multiyear, multiresearch institution effort.



But what he really hopes to gain is an ecological snapshot of the habitat and the environment.
Antarctica is cooling in some areas, scientists believe, because of the hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer. It is warming in others. Climate drivers like El Niño and La Niña and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation also play a role in seasonal variability.

What scientists know for sure is that surface-water temperatures in the southern ocean around Antarctica are getting warmer and less salty, there is more precipitation, and there are shifts in the ice patterns.
What does this mean for the penguins?

Some species aren't doing as well as others in some locations because of shifts in the environment.
Adélie penguins that are part of Oliver's research are one example.
These birds -- which weigh about 10 pounds and stand 2 feet tall -- favor an ice-rich habitat, said Megan Cimino, one of Oliver's graduate students who is just starting her doctoral studies.

Around Palmer Station, the focus of Oliver's research, the bird populations are declining.
"They are either dying or moving somewhere else," Cimino said.
One hypothesis is that they may disappear from the Palmer Station area.
Oliver said there are colonies farther south that are doing great.
"We're seeing pretty big shifts," he said.

To do the research, Oliver and a team of scientists from other universities rely on high-tech tools. They attach small tracking devices -- boxes about the size of a Snickers bar -- to the penguins, and they can follow their movements for days. The transmitters are recovered and redeployed on different penguins -- so many birds are tracked over the Antarctic spring and summer.
The transmitters allow the researchers to monitor bird movement by computer tracking.
Doug White, a research associate who runs the university's ocean information center, said the transmitters send out location signals fed to computers.

On the screen, the path each bird has traveled is color-coded and makes a jagged up-and-back pattern.
Meanwhile, a bright yellow, torpedo-like device called a glider is deployed into the water. It takes repeated readings on temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and chlorophyll.
It, too, is transmitted to laptop computers. Its path also is shown on the map.
Satellite imagery provides a snapshot over time of the changing landscape.
These pieces of the puzzle are all stitched together with a goal of getting a clearer picture of the habitat in the area around Palmer Station.

Cimino said one reason it is important to look at all the variables is that maybe it's less krill that's driving this shift among the penguins or maybe there are different strategies that the three species of penguins in the area -- the Adélies, Gentoos and Chinstraps -- use.
"It wasn't that long ago that we didn't even know where these birds went," Oliver said.
Whatever is going on, the Palmer Station area seems a less hospitable habitat for the Adélies and more suitable for the Gentoos and Chinstraps, he said.

Among the signals they are watching for are where the birds forage for food and whether there is something unique in the current that drives their quest for krill, he said.
"The animals are a window into the ecosystem," said Travis Miles, a graduate student at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Science. Miles is working on the joint research project and is based at Palmer Station. "It's all tied together."
Oliver's part in the project is a three-year oceanographic project through the NASA Biodiversity research program.

The work is designed to discover the ecological shifts that are driving the bird movement. The work includes data gathered from U.S. satellites.
Oliver was in Antarctica last year. This year, other research teams are gathering information on the ground and feeding it back to the University of Delaware.

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