Foraging behavior and energy dynamics of Antarctic penguins

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the Antarctic Ocean penguins play important role in the Antarctic marine ecosystem by foraging the Antarctic krill and some other prey organisms which are, particularly krill, key species of the ecosystem. In the recent studies, it was revealed that global climate system have significant effect on the Antarctic marine ecosystem through the change of sea ice condition. To understand how such change and effect may occur is still uncertain. We studied the process of change by measuring effort of dividing and foraging behavior of penguins by highly sophisticated micro-data logger system. The result showed that penguins dive deeper and longer when ice condition was heavy inndicating their increase of foraging effort. They showed unique dive profile benarth the sea ice which weree never seen in ice free area. This suggest that heavy ice condition have a kind of stress to the penguins. Interesting results on swim behavior was also found in this study. Swim speed of penguin (king penguin) was 2m/second during dive and increase their speed up to 3m/s at the last moment of ascending phase without paying any fluttering effort. This suggest that they came to surface by increased buoyancy of inflated air volume in their lungs.