Wild Emperor penguins are only found in Antarctica. From birth, they spend their entire lives in and around the Antarctic ice, although very rarely vagrants have turned up off the coast of New Zealand. Emperors are the biggest of the 18 species of penguin found today, and one of the largest of all birds.
They are approximately cm tall about the height of a six year old child and weigh in at around 40 kg, though their weight does fluctuate dramatically throughout the year. Fossils recovered from the Antarctic Peninsula reveal that a colossus species of penguin which lived about 37 million years ago may have stood 2m tall and weighed as much as kg.
There are approximately , adult Emperor penguins in Antarctica. But due to a lack of research, there is still so much we don't know about these magnificent polar creatures.
That's why we're funding research in the Antarctic, because the more we know, the better we can protect them. This will encourage the formation of Marine Protected Areas and will help in protecting the species in the face of climate change. Emperor penguin colonies have been discovered and counted from space. A survey led by British scientists in used satellite technology to identify emperor colonies from the poo stains left on the ice at breeding sites.
They discovered a number of previously unvisited colonies and counted every individual penguin. In there are now thought to be around 54 Emperor colonies in the Antarctic. About half of these have been discovered by satellite survey and most of these remain unvisited. Emperors incubate their eggs during the long dark southern winter months.
Courtship displays are intricate but copulation is quick and the female lays a single egg in May or June. Emperors have excellent insulation in the form of several layers of scale-like feathers — it takes very strong winds over 60 knots or about kilometres per hour to get them ruffled.
In proportion to their overall size, they have small bills and flippers to conserve heat. Their nasal chambers also recover much of the heat that is normally lost during exhalation. Emperor penguins have large reserves of energy-giving body fat and a relatively low level of activity during winter. They are very social creatures, and one of their survival mechanisms is to huddle together to keep warm.
This huddling instinct means that they do not defend any territory. The emperor penguin is the only species of penguin that is not territorial. Like other animals that live in the polar regions, special fats in their feet prevent them from freezing. Emperors have strong claws for gripping the ice. Emperor penguins breed in colonies scattered around the Antarctic continent. Colonies range in size from a few hundred to over 20, pairs. Most colonies are situated on the fast-ice that is locked between islands or grounded icebergs.
Conservation status: near threatened. Emperor penguin populations are projected to undergo a moderately rapid decline over the next three generations owing to the effects of projected climate change.
Researchers are studying the influence of climatic changes on populations and how future environmental change may impact the species. The emperor has not only evolved special physical characteristics to help it survive the extreme Antarctic conditions, it has also developed some unique social behaviours such as huddling.
Like most penguins, emperor parents closely share parental duties once the chicks have hatched. But only the males take on the incubation duties. Emperor penguins are exquisite divers! While they mostly forage at depths of to metres, the deepest dive recorded was to metres.
On average, dives last 3 to 6 minutes but the longest dive on record was 22 minutes. They have a varied menu that changes with the season. Some prey items are more important than others. And this, I think, is an example of that. Kooyman thinks that the behavior might give penguins in these more Northern colonies, closer to the open water, a dietary advantage. The penguins that they tracked might have also been females that had just laid their eggs, or non-breeding penguins, and other observations have shown that there is some penguin traffic in and out of a colony during the pre-laying period.
But figuring out how all of the information fits together is tricky, because of the remoteness of many Emperor penguin colonies. There are some colonies in East Antarctica where winter observations are not that unusual but in other areas Ross and Weddell seas and West Antarctica such observations are exceedingly rare.
The data presented here are rare because Kooyman and his colleagues managed to get to a colony in the Ross Sea no less! Wienecke also studies Emperor penguins but was not involved in this research. Cape Washington, where Kooyman and his colleague Robert van Dam made the observations, is located to the north of some other colonies much further inland.
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