Description: Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri Gray) are the only vertebrate species that breed during the Antarctic winter. From the beginning of the breeding season in April until fledging of the chicks in January, emperor penguins rely on the stability of sea (fast) ice. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has recently listed the species as ‘near threatened’ because the habitat of emperor penguins may deteriorate significantly over the coming years with the anticipated changes in sea ice conditions due to climate change. Since 2009, four emperor penguin colonies have been observed on ice shelves, as opposed to sea ice, during the breeding season (Fretwell et al. 2014). This striking change in their breeding behaviour was interpreted as an adaptation of emperor penguins to poor sea ice conditions. Here we report that a large part of the emperor penguin colony at Atka Bay (Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica) moved onto the ice shelf during the 2013 breeding season. This colony has been regularly observed since 1981 but has never before been seen breeding, incubating their eggs, brooding or crèching on the ice shelf. Our observations concur with a recent report, which documented that altered breeding behaviour in emperor penguins has occurred almost simultaneously across Antarctica (Fretwell et al. 2014). Interestingly, the sea ice at Atka Bay has been stable for three consecutive seasons and thus cannot have triggered this change in behaviour. Rather, we present evidence of increased snow accumulation that has greatly improved the accessibility of the ice shelves around Atka Bay, and we discuss additional meteorological factors and local topographical conditions that may have contributed to the shift in breeding location from sea ice onto an ice shelf.

Description: © The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Houstin, A., Zitterbart, D., Winterl, A., Richter, S., Planas-Bielsa, V., Chevallier, D., Ancel, A., Fournier, J., Fabry, B., & Le Bohec, C. Biologging of emperor penguins-attachment techniques and associated deployment performance. PLoS One, 17(8), (2022): e0265849, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265849.

Description: An increasing number of marine animals are equipped with biologgers, to study their physiology, behaviour and ecology, often for conservation purposes. To minimise the impacts of biologgers on the animals’ welfare, the Refinement principle from the Three Rs framework (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement) urges to continuously test and evaluate new and updated biologging protocols. Here, we propose alternative and promising techniques for emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) capture and on-site logger deployment that aim to mitigate the potential negative impacts of logger deployment on these birds. We equipped adult emperor penguins for short-term (GPS, Time-Depth Recorder (TDR)) and long-term (i.e. planned for one year) deployments (ARGOS platforms, TDR), as well as juvenile emperor penguins for long-term deployments (ARGOS platforms) in the Weddell Sea area where they had not yet been studied. We describe and qualitatively evaluate our protocols for the attachment of biologgers on-site at the colony, the capture of the animals and the recovery of the devices after deployment. We report unprecedented recaptures of long-term equipped adult emperor penguins (50% of equipped individuals recaptured after 290 days). Our data demonstrate that the traditional technique of long-term attachment by gluing the biologgers directly to the back feathers causes excessive feather breakage and the loss of the devices after a few months. We therefore propose an alternative method of attachment for back-mounted devices. This technique led to successful year-round deployments on 37.5% of the equipped juveniles. Finally, we also disclose the first deployments of leg-bracelet mounted TDRs on emperor penguins. Our findings highlight the importance of monitoring potential impacts of biologger deployments on the animals and the need to continue to improve methods to minimize disturbance and enhance performance and results.

Description: This study was funded by the Centre Scientifique de Monaco with additional support from the LIA-647 and RTPI-NUTRESS (CSM/CNRS¬-University of Strasbourg), by The Penzance Endowed Fund and The Grayce B. Kerr Fund in Support of Assistant Scientists and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grants ZI1525/3-1 in the framework of the priority program “Antarctic research with comparative investigations in Arctic ice areas”. Logistics and field efforts were supported by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) within the framework of the program MARE.

Description: Studies of animal behavior in remote polar regions are essential to understand ecologic change, yet they require significant human and logistic resources. Behavioral data are mostly gathered by tagging single animals, such as penguins and whales. While tagging delivers high-accuracy data for single animals, it cannot be used to study collective behavior in social species due to high costs and the often time-consuming or disturbing tagging process. We present an alternative approach to study animal behavior using automated, remotely operated and energetically independent image acquisition systems. We developed a land-based system for studying penguins, and a sea-based system to study whales. The sea-based system employs a rotating infrared camera (5 rev/s, 360°) for the automatic detection of whales within a radius of up to 3 nautical miles during day and night, and a high-resolution CCD camera equipped with a telephoto lens. Upon detection of a whale in the thermal image, the CCD-camera is automatically pointed at the respective location, and triggered to acquire photos at 5 Hz, allowing species identification up to several miles distance The imaging system is mounted on an active tilt stage to counteract ship movements in heavy seas, which allows to calculate absolute whale positions with an accuracy of ~10%. From the trajectory of an individual whale, likely areas of subsequent surfacing positions are estimated, providing proactive tracing of the whale, which improves the likelyhood of capturing it on photo and and its identification. Automatic whale detection and identification data may then be used to conduct autonomous line transect surveys throughout the cruise. Continuous automatic whale detections during recent expeditions contibuted significantly to the amount of data available for density calculations and habitat suitability modeling. We will present data from three expeditions on RV Polarstern during the years 2009-2011, including several tens of ship-whale encounters. The system will be used during two more expeditions in early 2012, for automatic marine mammal detection, localization and identification purposes. Our land-based system employed a simpler image acquisition and automated analysis technology and was first used to study the collective behavior of Emperor penguins during huddling. The system is capable of simultaneously tracking the positions of more than 1400 huddling emperor penguins. The trajectories revealed that Emperor penguins move collectively in a highly coordinated manner to ensure mobility while at the same time keeping the huddle tightly packed. Every 30–60 seconds, all penguins make small steps, which travel as a wave through the entire huddle. Over time, these small movements lead to large-scale reorganization of the huddle. Moreover, from the high-resolution images is it possible to obtain a precise count of the penguin colony, and to obtain morphometric data from individual penguins to monitor their nutritional state. Thus far, we built five observatories that are currently being shipped to an Adélie penguin (Adélie Land), King penguin (Crozet Island) and Emperor penguin (Atka Bay, Adélie Land) colony, respectively. All three observatories are designed for year-round operations.

Description: Despite the enormous popularity of penguins, their social behaviour remains poorly understood. Video recordings of penguins and penguin colonies are sporadic, of insufficient resolution and duration, and suffer from camera movements that may be artistically motivated but make them scientifically worthless. Recordings of penguin colonies during the winter months are particularly short in supply. Here we present three different observatories that are able to automatically take time-lapse recording over prolonged time periods under harsh climatic conditions. i) The microbs is a very low cost observatory (~700 US$), capable of recording high-resolution (12 MPix) time-lapse data. It features a water-proof Canon D10 consumer-grade camera that we programmed through a bootable SD-card. The camera is powered by a 40 W solar panel and a 100 Ah 12V battery. The microbs can record up to 32 GB of data (approximately one month at a rate of 1 image/min) before the memory card has to be changed manually. ii) To enable even longer observations at very remote locations where a regular change of the SD-card is not feasible, we designed the Mobile Emperor Penguin Observatory (MEPO). It is equipped with a night vision (b/w) and daylight (color) CCD-sensor. Images are recorded on a solid-state PC with very low energy consumption, or they can be sent via satellite (Inmarsat) that is available on large parts of the Antarctic coast. The observatory is remote-operated through the satellite link to adjust parameters such as image frame rate, to select the images to be sent via satellite or to power the observatory up or down. iii) The Single Penguin Observation & Tracking (SPOT) observatory is used to track the movements of individual penguins over prolonged time periods and count the present number of individual penguins. The observatory consists of a wide-angle (45°) camera and a high-speed (5 images/s) high resolution (11 MPix) camera equipped with a telephoto lens (400-600mm). We are currently deploying three microbs, one MEPO and one SPOT observatory during the Antarctic summer 2011 at Crozet Island, Adelie Land and Atka Bay, respectively, and will present first results.

Description: In polar regions, highly adapted social behavior is crucial for the survival of several species. One prominent example is the huddling behavior of Emperor penguins. To understand how Emperor penguins solve the physical problem of movement in densely packed huddles, we observed an Emperor penguin colony (Atka Bay) with time-lapse imaging and tracked the positions of more than 1400 huddling penguins. The trajectories revealed that Emperor penguins move collectively in a highly coordinated manner to ensure mobility while at the same time keeping the huddle tightly packed. Every 30 - 60 seconds, all penguins make small steps, which travel as a wave through the entire huddle. Over time, these small movements lead to large-scale reorganization of the huddle. Our data show that the dynamics of penguin huddling is governed by intermittency and approach to kinetic arrest in striking analogy with inert non-equilibrium systems. We will also present observations from a different Emperor penguin colony (Adélie Land), an Adélie penguin colony (Adélie Land), and a King penguin colony (Crozet Island).

Description: Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2020. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology 37(5), (2020): 807-824, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-19-0054.1.

Description: Marine mammals are under growing pressure as anthropogenic use of the ocean increases. Ship strikes of large whales and loud underwater sound sources including air guns for marine geophysical prospecting and naval midfrequency sonar are criticized for their possible negative effects on marine mammals. Competent authorities regularly require the implementation of mitigation measures, including vessel speed reductions or shutdown of acoustic sources if marine mammals are sighted in sensitive areas or in predefined exclusion zones around a vessel. To ensure successful mitigation, reliable at-sea detection of animals is crucial. To date, ship-based marine mammal observers are the most commonly implemented detection method; however, thermal (IR) imaging–based automatic detection systems have been used in recent years. This study evaluates thermal imaging–based automatic whale detection technology for its use across different oceans. The performance of this technology is characterized with respect to environmental conditions, and an automatic detection algorithm for whale blows is presented. The technology can detect whales in polar, temperate, and subtropical ocean regimes over distances of up to several kilometers and outperforms marine mammal observers in the number of whales detected. These results show that thermal imaging technology can be used to assist in providing protection for marine mammals against ship strike and acoustic impact across the world’s oceans.

Description: This work was funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under Award N000141310856, by the Environmental Studies Research Fund (ESRF; esrfunds.org) under Award 2014-03S and by the Alfred-Wegener-Institute Helmholtz Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung. DPZ and OB declare competing financial interests: 1) Patent US8941728B2, DE102011114084B4: A method for automatic real-time marine mammal detection. The patent describes the ideas basic to the automatic whale detection software as used to acquire and process the data presented in this paper. 2) Licensing of the Tashtego automatic whale detection software to the manufacturer of IR sensor. The authors confirm that these competing financial interests did not alter their adherence good scientific practice. We thank P. Abgrall, J. Coffey, K. Keats, B. Mactavish, V. Moulton, and S. Penney-Belbin for data collection or IR image review. We thank S. Besaw, J. Christian, A. Coombs, P. Coombs, W. Costello, T. Elliott, E. Evans, I. Goudie, C. Jones, K. Knowles, R. Martin, A. Murphy, D. and J. Shepherd; and the staffs at the Irish Loop Express, the Myrick Wireless Interpretive Centre, the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, and the lighthouse keepers for logistical assistance at our remote field site. We thank D. Boutilier and B. McDonald (DFO) for assisting us in obtaining license to occupy permits for Cape Race. We thank D. Taylor (ESRF Research Manager) for his support.

Description: Adult and juvenile emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) were fitted with different type of loggers (GPS, TDR, ARGOS) at Atka Bay colony (Queen Maud Land), Weddell Sea coast, in summer season 2017-2018 & 2018-2019. Capture, handling and deployment techniques are shared through several additional files.