This is video of a colony of Adélie penguins, Antarctica.
From Nature:
Whaling made penguins switch to krill
Birds changed diet after humans killed shrimp eaters.
Heidi Ledford
Ancient eggshell fragments show that Adélie penguins living in Antarctica switched from eating fish to krill around the time that humans began hunting seals and whales. The finding suggests that when humans removed krill-eating predators the penguins exploited the resulting shrimp surplus.
Steven Emslie of the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, and William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, analysed more than 220 fossil eggshell pieces ranging from 100 to 38,000 years old, and compared them with samples from modern nests.
By comparing the proportion of certain forms of carbon and nitrogen in the shells with the proportions found in fish and krill, the researchers could tell what the birds had been eating.
Emslie expected to find changes in diet matching climate change. Instead, the penguin menu remained biased towards fish until about 200 years ago, when the birds switched to krill.
Recent global warming and the rise in krill fisheries has reduced krill stocks and could be contributing to the decline in Adélie penguin populations on the Antarctic Peninsula, says Emslie.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dietary switch
From 1793 to 1807, an estimated 3.2 million seals were taken from the Southern Ocean. The resulting crash in the seal population — including the Antarctic fur seal Arctocephalus gazella, which fed primarily on krill — caused the industry to collapse.
This implies a huge dietary response.
Whaling took off in the 1800s and continued until the mid-twentieth century, eventually depleting baleen whale populations by more than 90%. It’s estimated that the combined harvest of seals and whales resulted in more than 150 million tonnes of extra krill each year.
Krill is an attractive food for penguins because it is high in protein and tends to travel in swarms. “The birds can capture lots of high-energy prey in a short time,” says Emslie.
“This implies a huge ecological dietary response by the penguins in relation to some change in their environment,” says Keith Hobson of the Canadian Wildlife Service in Saskatchewan. But the reasons behind this switch are less obvious, he says.
“Abundance of a secondary food item does not necessarily explain this unless it was accompanied by a reduction in fish,” says Hobson. “Why does it matter that krill became more abundant to a predator that previously happily made eggs from fish?”
A further boost
The switch might be explained by an increase in fishing, says David Ainley of the California ecological consulting firm H. T. Harvey & Associates. “Not only were whales and seals removed,” he says, “there was a massive removal of fish from the Scotia Sea and western Antarctic Peninsula region at the same time.” Many of these fish ate krill, so their removal would have further boosted krill supplies.
Their dietary flexibility demonstrates the penguins’ ability to adjust to large ecological changes, but that doesn’t mean they’ll survive the changes to come, says Hobson. “I remain a pessimist when it comes to how they may now cope with the onslaught of climate change,” he says.
See also here.
Adélie penguin poo: here.
A “criminal” stone-stealing Adelie penguin has been captured on camera by a BBC film crew: here.
Antarctic life during the ice ages: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Tuesday 24th July, 2007
Global warming threatens survival of cold-blooded Antarctic marine animals
ANI Tuesday 24th July, 2007
Washington, July 24 : A limpet no bigger than a coin could reveal the possible fate of cold-blooded Antarctic marine animals, according to new research published this week in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
Compared to their temperate and tropical cousins, cold-blooded polar marine animals are incapable of fast growth.
Until now scientists had assumed that a lack of food in winter was the major limiting factor.
But now, studies of the protein-making abilities of limpets in both the sea around the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Rothera Research Station and in the laboratory aquarium has shown that these animals cannot make proteins – the building blocks of growth – efficiently.
Growth in animals occurs primarily by making and retaining proteins.
But, while the tropical water limpets typically retain 70 percent of the proteins they make, those in the Antarctic appear only to retain about 20 percent.
According to lead author Dr Keiron Fraser from BAS, the findings are an important step in understanding the complex biodiversity of Antarctica’s unique ecosystem.
“Sea temperature is predicted to increase by around 2 degree C in the next 100 years. If cold-blooded Antarctic animals can’t grow efficiently, or increase their growth rates, they are unlikely to be able to cope in warmer water, or compete with species that will inevitably move into the region as temperatures rise,” said Dr Keiron.
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