Some years in the past, researchers in Ushuaia, the southernmost metropolis of Argentina, noticed some surprising winter guests. Martillo Island, a speck of land within the Beagle Channel, repeatedly attracts vacationer boats owing to its photogenic colonies of magellanic and gentoo penguins. Visit immediately, nevertheless, and you might simply be fortunate sufficient to identify an outsider: a king penguin, staring out throughout the channel from the island’s pebble seaside, head and shoulders taller than the gentoos and about twice the scale of the magellanics.
A handful of king penguins have been caught by digicam traps on the islands, typically hanging out within the gentoo nesting grounds. King penguins might be discovered elsewhere in Patagonia, however hadn’t been noticed on this island earlier than. How they bought there, the place they got here from, and even what number of there are, is a thriller. “We don’t know anything about king penguins at Martillo Island,” says Sami Dodino, a penguinologist at Argentinian scientific institute CADIC.
Ushuaia, proper on the southern tip of Argentina, is thought fondly as “The End of the World.” Travel round 1,000 km south and the subsequent place you attain is Antarctica (though not earlier than passing via one other settlement on the Chilean aspect of the Beagle Channel, Puerto Williams—“Beyond the End of the World”). Martillo Island has been house to magellanic penguins, small birds that are uncommon in that they dig burrows to nest in, because the 1970s, and welcomed gentoos, a bigger species which collects rocks to construct nests on the bottom, within the 1990s. King penguins look extra like the sort you in all probability first image whenever you think about a penguin. The second-largest species after the emperor penguin, they’ve distinctive orange “cheeks” and yellow-orange plumage on the high of their chest. The adults are elegant in stature, the chicks endearingly awkward of their rotund brown fuzziness.
Whether these few king penguins arrived at Martillo Island accidentally or design is unknown. “Probably it’s an accident,” says CADIC researcher Andrea Raya Rey. “They were wandering around the ocean looking for food.” When it’s time to moult, king penguins head ashore—often again to their authentic colony—earlier than returning to the ocean. But on this case, they could have regarded round, seen the opposite species of penguins on Martillo Island, and landed there to vary their feathers as an alternative. “King penguins are really long-distance foragers, so they expand their range,” Raya Rey says.
The researchers know from genetic testing that the gentoo colony on Martillo Island originated from people that got here from the Falkland Islands; there at the moment are round 30 pairs. The similar might be true of the king penguin guests. Alternatively, they could have come from Inútil Bay, just a few hundred kilometers north in Chile; Staten Island over to the east; or the island of South Georgia, which has a big king penguin colony, out within the Atlantic.
When the king penguins had been first noticed at Martillo Island, the researchers consider they could have been juveniles, as they didn’t seem to attempt to breed. But up to now few years, one pair has managed to put an egg. Last 12 months, for the primary time, they efficiently hatched a chick.
Sadly the thrill didn’t final lengthy, because the chick died just a few weeks later. “We believe maybe that was because we had a hot summer for Ushuaia,” Dodino says. Raya Rey provides that the chick would have in all probability died come winter in any case, because the dad and mom had been possible inexperienced and at a drawback owing to their small group. Usually, king penguin chicks collect collectively in winter for heat whereas their dad and mom hunt for meals; this doesn’t work with only one chick. “They are trying to start a new colony, but it’s very difficult for just a few individuals,” she says.
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