Penguins are shaking their tail feathers to new research that allows for less invasive methods to track their migration.
Researchers are now able to analyze a penguin’s tail feathers to track migration, an alternative to expensive and challenging methods to retrieve electronic devices.
Assistant Professor in the LSU Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences Michael Polito is the lead author of the study.
“Understanding the patterns of migration for wide-ranging marine animals like penguins is critical to their conservation,” Polito said in an email. “Simply put, if we don’t know where they are and what they are doing when they are there, it is difficult to create effective management strategies to conserve these species for future generations.”
Polito and his collaborators from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Southwest Fisheries Science Center, Oxford University and the Instituto Antártico Argentino attached tags to 52 adult Chinstrap and Adélie penguins at their breeding colonies. The following breeding season, they retrieved the tags to determine where the birds traveled over the winter. When they retrieved these tags, the researchers also took a tail feather grown over the winter from each tracked penguin and from 60 other penguins that had not been tagged, according to a news release.
“They also have declining populations in this region, especially along the western Antarctic Peninsula, where climatic warming has been most intense,” Polito said. “We know that they leave the breeding colonies during the winter, but due to the expense and limitations of GPS and satellite tracking, it has been difficult to follow many individuals from multiple colonies to find out exactly where they go.”
Penguins and other animals are “what they eat” as the geochemical signature of their food and the habits they feed in are imprinted into their growing tissues, Polito said.
“This forensic approach could be used on any tissue that is grown when a marine animal is migrating to, or inhabiting, its wintering ground,” Polito said. “For example, the whiskers of seals, the baleen plates of whales, and the shell “scutes” of sea turtles could all be analyzed using this technique. We are excited to see others use in and help to refine the technique.”
Polito and his team are the first to use carbon stable isotope analysis in essential amino acids to track migration routes. The amino acids give a clear forensic indication of the geographic location in the ocean where penguins are growing their tail feathers during their winter migration.
“The real benefit to this approach is that, when used in combination with direct tracking, it can greatly expand the number of individuals examined and evaluate migration trends at scales that would be logistically challenging using direct tracking alone,” Polito said. “A better understanding of how the ocean’s isotopic signature varies over space will help us to increase the geographic resolution of stable isotope tracking studies in the future.”

Gallery • 2 Photos

Courtesy of Michael Polito

Penguin Forensics