Initial Research

Gimeno, Míriam, et al. “Climate and Human Stressors on Global Penguin Hotspots: Current Assessments for Future Conservation.” Global Change Biology, vol. 30, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2024, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.17143, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17143. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.

‌ During this week’s assignments, we had to watch and annotate a science video. I chose to watch a video about how climate change affects penguins and how penguins become a sign of the effects which was published in 2010. Since then, our climate crisis has only worsened, so I wanted to look specifically for recent articles on Google Scholar. For years, penguins have been looked as sentinel animals as they are sensitive to climate threats and human-driven pressures. This study aims to focus on how these issues are distributed within important areas for penguins and how that affects them. They did this by tracking penguin behavior to see where their hotspots were and where different impacts were dispersed to see how that affected the penguins' behavior. They found the highest stressors were fishing efforts and increasing sea surface temperatures which affected food availability and the African penguins were the species most affected. Understanding which areas are of most risk to the penguins can help conservation groups focus on these areas and enhance the resilience of penguins. I think I can tell a story about this article making African penguins the protagonist. I believe that since they are most at risk, it can illicit an emotional connection to people to try to drive to make a change.

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Jaume Forcada, and Philip N Trathan. “Penguin Responses to Climate Change in the Southern Ocean.” Global Change Biology, vol. 15, no. 7, 1 July 2009, pp. 1618–1630, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01909.x, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.01909.x. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.

‌To find my second article, I went to my school's library, UCSB Library where I searched keywords; penguins and climate change. When I found this article, there was a link to access it online. This article is more a review than a study itself, which reviews current research on climate change and its effects on different species of penguins. They found that penguins most likely respond to changes in climate through dispersal which can account for negative population trends in areas where they would likely be. Because of this dispersal, they may find it difficult to adapt to new surroundings which can affect breeding. Understanding their behavior and how they respond to climate change is important to predict how they will respond to future changes. This article was published in 2009 and since then our climate crisis has only gotten worse. I am not sure if I can tell a story about this article since this was more of a review and was broader than the previous article I found. This study did name specific penguin species that are most at risk and those that are better at adaptability to climate change.