Galapagos penguins

While climate change spells trouble for some penguin species (such as African penguins), a study published this week reports that it actually might help endangered Galápagos penguins.

“With climate change, there are a lot of new and increasing stresses on ecosystems, but biology sometimes surprises us,” says lead author Kristopher Karnauskas of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “There might be places—little outposts—where ecosystems might thrive just by coincidence.”

In the case of the Galápagos penguins, those “little outposts” are their feeding and breeding grounds—the Galápagos archipelago’s westernmost islands, Isabela and Fernandina. The penguins feed on fish living in a cold pool of water on the islands’ southwestern coasts, which receive their chilled water supply from an ocean current called the Equatorial Undercurrent.

The new research suggests that shifts in wind currents—likely due to climate change and natural variability—have resulted in lighter winds over the past three decades, nudging the Equatorial Undercurrent northward. The changing current expanded the nutrient-rich, cold water farther north along the coasts of the two islands, likely boosting algae numbers, as well as the numbers of fish that eat the algae. This fish abundance allowed the penguin population to double over the past 30 years, swelling to more than 1,000 birds by 2014.

The new findings could help inform conservation efforts to save the endangered penguins, say the study’s authors. Increasing efforts on the northern coasts of the islands and expanding marine-protected areas north to where the penguins are now feeding and breeding could support population growth. And the penguins aren’t the only ones to benefit from the undercurrent’s course correction. The team reports that other animal populations such as the endangered Galápagos fur seal and the marine iguana also may profit from the prolific amount of food in the Galápagos cold pool.

This shows how large-scale changes in the climate can act locally, says Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “While it is important that we focus on the big picture with climate change, it’s really the small scale that matters to the animals and plants that are impacted,” she says.

Image: Alan Harper/Flickr

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