Ornithologist
Ornithologist: A scientist who studies birds. Uses visual surveys (from ship or on land), diet analysis, bird banding, and satellite tracking to collect data on penguins.
Adélie penguins spend their summers on land, where they breed. They spend winters on the outer extent of the sea ice surrounding Antarctica, where they molt their feathers and fatten up.
Adélies are visual predators, meaning they need enough light to see their prey. Near the outer part of the pack ice, there are only a few hours of daylight in the middle of the winter. There is less sunlight as you go farther south (closer to land).
On the western Antarctic Peninsula, Adélie penguins mostly eat krill, a shrimplike crustacean.
Several countries have been heavily harvesting krill since the mid-1960s.
Adélie penguins need dry, snow-free places to lay their eggs. They use the same nest sites each year and at about the same time every year.
Heavy snowfalls during the nesting season can bury adult Adélies and kill their eggs.
Female Adélies lay two eggs, but usually only one of those eggs results in a fledged chick (fledged chicks have a good chance of maturing into adults). The two most common causes of death of eggs and chicks are abandonment by the parents (if they cannot find enough food) and predation by skuas (hawk-like birds).
In the water, Adélies are eaten mostly by leopard seals and killer whales.
Adélies can look for food under sea ice because they can hold their breath for a long time. They are not as good at foraging in the open ocean, because they cannot swim very fast.
Adélie penguins have lived in the western Antarctic Peninsula for at least 644 years.
