As he and his companions hop about, enchanting the visitors at Banham Zoo in the United Kingdom, this penguin is unwittingly helping his wilder cousins to survive.
The zoo's penguin colony at Norfolk, eastern England, is being used to test a newly developed, high-technology penguin weigh-bridge before it undergoes field trials on the sub Antarctic Bird Island,
in South Georgia.
Information collected from the weigh-bridge will help researchers with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to understand why the penguins on the island have declined in number in recent years.
Banham Zoo's penguins will give BAS an idea of how the system is working so that any adjustments can be made before field trials begin.
Researchers from BAS worked with a consultant engineer to produce the automated system that identifies and weighs individual penguins in the wild as they come and go from their colonies.
Penguins are fitted with a small tag on an ankle bracelet that gives each an individual identification number that works like a barcode. Each time a tagged penguin walks across the weigh-bridge,
either on its way out of the colony to go to sea or on its way back to bring food to its chick, its identity and weight is recorded on a data-logger.
Dr Kate Barlow of BAS said: "It is a challenge to design a device that can record the weight of a moving object. The weigh-bridge is painted to blend in with its surroundings so that the birds
will hop on to it. They need to stay in one position long enough to make an accurate measurement so a small hop on to a step makes them stop before making a decision on what to do next. At the zoo we
have been able to test the equipment in a fairly controlled environment but the behaviour of penguins in a large colony is bound to give us a few technical adjustments to make later.''
With a world population of about five to six million breeding pairs, macaroni penguins (so-called because of their orange crest) are one of the most important predators in the Scotia Sea. There are
about 2.5 million pairs breeding at South Georgia. Bird Island is a UK Overseas Territory in the Southern Ocean about 12,870 kilometres from the UK.
The BAS long-term monitoring studies at Bird Island show that population may have halved since 1976 and scientists are keen to understand why this has happened.
One of the factors that concerns BAS is the effect that environmental changes · whether natural or caused by human activities · have had on penguin populations.
Fishing is an important industry in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic region and the international commission for the Conservation of Marine Living Resources have the task of evaluating the situation
there. Research such as that carried out by BAS assists the commission to recommend catch levels for commercial fisheries.
"We want to know how much food the parents bring back to their chicks in the colony, how often they feed them and so on. Our current technique for weighing involves catching them, putting them in
a bag and using a handheld balance hooked to the bag. This automatic system will minimise the disturbance to the penguins'', said Dr Kate Barlow.
Freitag, 31. März 2000