Pirate's Cove

In Warmist World the natural processes and such on Earth never ever changed prior man-caused climate doom

Antarctic penguins have radically shifted their breeding season – seemingly in response to climate change

Penguins in Antarctica have radically shifted their breeding season, apparently as a response to climate change, research has found.

Dramatic shifts in behaviour were revealed by a decade-long study led by Penguin Watch at the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, with some penguins’ breeding period moving forward by more than three weeks.

The changes threaten to disrupt penguins’ access to food, increasing concerns for their survival. “We are very concerned because these penguins are advancing their season so much, and penguins are now breeding earlier than in any known records,” said the report’s lead author, Dr Ignacio Juarez Martínez.

“The changes are happening so fast that the penguins could end up breeding at times when their prey is not available yet. This could result in a lack of food for the penguin chicks in the first weeks of their life, which could be fatal. Even if the penguins could match their prey’s behaviour, we can’t expect them to keep this pace up much longer.”

Obviously, the memo went out to publish this doom

The researchers examined changes in the timing of penguin breeding between 2012 and 2022, specifically their “settlement” at a colony – the first date at which penguins continuously occupied a nesting zone. Three species – Adélie (Pygoscelis adeliae), chinstrap (P antarcticus) and gentoo (P papua) – were studied, with colony sizes ranging from a dozen nests up to hundreds of thousands of nests. (snip)

Gentoo penguins showed the greatest change, with an average advance of 13 days over the decade and up to 24 days in some gentoo colonies. This represents the fastest change in phenology (timing of breeding) recorded in any bird, and possibly any vertebrate, to date. Adélie and chinstrap penguins also advanced their breeding by an average of 10 days.

Such drastic changes also threaten to increase competition between the region’s penguin species, with clear “winners” and “losers” expected.

So, did they always breed at the same time over the last 8,000 years, the Holocene, during all those warm and cool periods? Or, did things change periodically? If they cannot answer that question, much less what has happened over the millions of years penguins have been in Antarctica, then they are just fearmongering. One little study over 10 years is meaningless. But, that’s not the point: it’s all about scaring people to get money, getting attention for the researchers, getting government to Do Something. To push climate cult doctrine.