Presence of King penguins ( Aptenodytes patagonicus ) on Elephant Island provides further evidence of range expansion
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Presence of King penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) on Elephant Island provides further evidence of range expansion Alex Borowicz1 · Steve Forrest2 · Michael Wethington1 · Noah Strycker3 · Heather J. Lynch1,4 Received: 24 April 2020 / Revised: 1 October 2020 / Accepted: 7 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract King penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) are a circumpolar sub-Antarctic species inhabiting most of the major sub-Antarctic island chains of the Southern Ocean, the Falkland Islands, and regions of Patagonia. Despite early suggestions to the contrary, there is no conclusive historical evidence of King penguin inhabitation of the Antarctic Peninsula or the South Shetland Islands until the past decade. After a near-complete survey of Elephant Island, we report widespread presence of this species, including documented incubation at one site and molting at another. While we found no evidence of King penguins successfully fledging a chick at any of the sites where individuals were found, their presence across numerous sites suggests the potential for future range expansion in response to warming conditions. Keywords Range expansion · Climate change · Colonization · Antarctica
Introduction As biotic and physical conditions change in the oceans, widescale range expansions and latitudinal or elevational shifts are expected and, in many cases, have already been documented (Root et al. 2003; Poloczanska et al. 2013). The King penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) has a circumsubantarctic range, making wide use of the Antarctic Polar Front as a foraging ground (Pütz et al. 2014), and rearing chicks in typically large colonies on sub-Antarctic islands, the Falkland Islands, and the shores of the Strait of Magellan. Population estimates have remained challenging for this species due to the sheer size of their breeding colonies, which can contain hundreds of thousands of individuals as at the largest colony on South Georgia (Foley et al. 2020), as well as their asynchronous reproductive phenology and
* Alex Borowicz [email protected] 1
Department of Ecology & Evolution, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794‑5245, USA
2
Antarctic Resource Inc., Truckee, CA 96161, USA
3
School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794‑5000, USA
4
Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794‑5250, USA
the remoteness of their colonies. Despite the challenges of surveying, recent investigation into the population trajectory at various colonies suggests an overall increasing trend (Woehler and Croxall 1997; Foley et al. 2018) with notable exceptions (e.g., Weimerskirch et al. 2018). Though there have been reports of King penguin presence in the South Shetland Islands for over 150 years, after a review of the literature and historic documents, Conroy and White (1973) concluded that the South Shetland Islands were not likely to have hosted a reproductive population at
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