A trivial piece from Mr Trivelpiece



He claims that young penguins are dying due to lack of food and the lack of food is due to global warming. Since there has been NO warming (more a cooling) in the Antarctic, his claims fall at the first hurdle. See the graph of Antarctic temperatures that I put up yesterday. Even the trivial one's own work suggests that penguin populations wax and wane naturally

Young penguins in the Antarctic may be dying because they are having a tougher time finding food, as melting sea ice cuts back on the tiny fish they eat, US researchers suggested on Monday. Only about 10 percent of baby penguins tagged by researchers are coming back in two to four years to breed, down from 40-50 percent in the 1970s, said the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It is a dramatic change," lead researcher Wayne Trivelpiece, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Antarctic Ecosystem Research Division, told AFP. "There are still two to three million chinstrap pairs in this region but there were seven to eight million two decades ago," he said.

"There is some concern now. We need to follow these animals and track them."

Trivelpiece was a co-author on a study published in 1992 that suggested penguin populations were surging and subsiding according to changes in sea ice -- with the chinstrap doing better in warm years and the Adelie thriving in cold years. Chinstrap penguins eat and make their nests away from the snow and ice and so are considered ice-avoiding animals, unlike their Adelie counterparts who feed in icy habitats and are seen as more vulnerable when there is less ice.

However, Trivelpiece and his co-authors now believe that krill are the real culprit for the disappearing penguin populations, and the damage affects both types of penguins.

Krill needs ice to survive, and as climate change causes more polar sea ice to melt, the tiny sea creatures cannot breed or feast on phytoplankton in the ice and their numbers fall, taking away an important source of nourishment for penguins. "Under a scenario of global warming and increasing temperature we had prophesized that Adelies and ice-loving animals like Adelies should decline while chinstraps and ice-avoiding animals should increase," Trivelpiece said.

But shortly after the team's paper was published in the early 90s, the data began to change. "From that point shortly thereafter onward, we lost those large fluxes and both species started behaving the same way and both started declining dramatically," he said.

More HERE

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