AN INFLATABLE BOAT PULLS UP next to the snowy shore, and
the gentoo penguins of Neko Harbor see people for the first
time in almost a year.
Rather than a gaggle of tourists (absent because of the coro-
navirus pandemic), out climb Tom Hart, a penguin biologist
from Oxford University, and several other scientists returning
to the Antarctic Peninsula in January 2021. Honks and calls
ripple through the colony of about 2,000 gentoos as one of
the 2.5-foot-tall birds waddles through to find its nest. The
penguins pay no attention to Hart as he makes straight for
the time-lapse trail camera perched on a tripod and wedged
in place with rocks. He retrieves the memory card from inside
the camera’s waterproof housing.
The camera has been taking pictures of the penguins every
hour, from dawn till dusk, since they settled down at the nest-
ing colony four months earlier to lay their eggs and rear their
chicks. It’s one of nearly a hundred cameras dotted across
the 830-mile-long, 43-mile-wide peninsula that have been
monitoring breeding colonies of three penguin species during
the past decade.
Gentoo numbers on the peninsula have increased rapidly—
more than tripling at many sites during the past 30 years—and
the birds are expanding south into new areas that had been too
icy for them, leveraging their flexible foraging and breeding
strategies. In stark contrast, their sister species—the smaller
chinstrap penguins and the sleek, black-headed Adélie pen-
guins—have declined by upwards of 75 percent at many of the
colonies where gentoos are thriving.
“Very roughly,” Hart says, “you lose one Adélie, you lose
one chinstrap, you gain a gentoo.”
Penguins are important sentinels for the wider health
of the oceans. They’re highly sensitive to environmental
changes and rely on productive seas and abundant prey.
Penguin scientists aren’t worried that chinstraps and Adélies
will disappear from the planet—som
beyond the peninsula appear to be s
some may even be increasing.
“What concerns us is that they’re
so sharply on the Antarctic Penins
Heather Lynch, an ecologist at Sto
University in New York State. Shifts i
populations in the waters off Antar
Southern Ocean—are warning sign
ecosystem is being disrupted. “It r
us that something has changed abo
the Southern Ocean works and tha
intended, that’s the tip of the iceberg
This icy world is imperiled: The
Peninsula is one of the fastest warm
on the planet. Air temperatures dur
wave in February 2020 reached a recoA
The National
Geographic Society,
committed to illuminating
and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded
Explorer Thomas P. Peschak’s
storytelling around biodiver-
sity since 2017.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MCKENDRY106 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC