Across The Southern Oceans, Penguin Populations Collapsing - Sydney Morning Herald

[hatrack]

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In the sub-Antarctic, king penguins fledge fewer chicks if the parents must forage in warming seas. Rising waters are swamping limited nesting space for African penguins in Namibia. And because climate change's legacy varies capriciously, little penguins in Bass Strait seem to do better when the water temperature is up.

But it's on the the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula that the signal is clearest. The raucous cacophony of Adelie penguins has disappeared from the landscape as colonies collapse. "On top of a single high rock I see an unbearably poignant tableau," recounts the science writer Meredith Hooper, as she witnesses the demise of a colony. "One fluffy chick is standing, very still, on its pebble nest, with one adult. A skua stands next to them. Waiting. Death openly in attendance." Ocean temperatures off the peninsula's west coast are up 1 degree in 50 years. Annual mean temperatures on the peninsula have warmed 3 degrees - or 10 times the global rate. There, scientists have discovered that humans are making weather - ozone depletion and greenhouse gases have strengthened the westerly winds.

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Hooper, who describes in her book The Ferocious Summer, just published, what happens, watched as the snowstorms belted in. "If birds stand up to shift position, snow falls on the eggs to melt into a puddle. Eggs are crushed or kicked out of nests as birds try to deal with the snow. Or the eggs lie cold, flooded out." Then after the surviving chicks fledged, the rain came. "Cold doesn't affect the chicks. It's the rain, soaking their down, forcing them to shiver, using up vital calories in an attempt to keep warm."

Reproduction in the Palmer study area collapsed. An average long-term breeding success rate of 1.34 chicks per pair was measured by Fraser as collapsing to 0.55 chicks. On one of the islands, Litchfield, 1000 pairs of Adelies nested 50 years ago. That summer in 2002, 12 chicks hatched - all to be taken by the crowding, predatory skuas. "There are no sounds but the wash of the sea, the occasional calls of skuas," Hooper observed. "Every penguin is gone, the nests are abandoned. Listen to the silence. The silence of absence. The sound of failure."

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/sentinels-for-a-lost-world/2007/09/24/1190486226019.html

[phantom power]

1. Collapsed. That word is becoming almost as common as "faster than expected."

[tom_paine]

2. The power of positive feedback...loops, that is.

I begin to think that mostregulated systems are negative feedback but that the earth's environment, after buffering effects are expended, seem to be a positive feeback loops means "god" or The Universe or whatever has set harsh booby traps for speciestoo stupid and shortsighted to survive "young adulthood".

I believe the Misguided Monkey-People of Sol III or Homo sapiens are such a dead end, now 90% certain.