i want to talk about penguins today but first i want to start by saying that we need a new operating system for the oceans and for the earth
when i came to the galapagos forty years ago there were three thousand people that lived in the galapagos now there are over thirty thousand
so the fundamental problems that we face are over consumption and too many people it's the same problems in the galapagos except obviously
it's worse here in some ways than other places because we've only doubled the population of the earth since the nineteen sixties a little more than doubled but we have six point seven billion people in the world
and we all like to consume and one of the major problems that we have is our operating system is not giving us the proper feedback we're not paying the true environmental costs of our actions
and when i came at age twenty two to live on fernandina let me just say that i had never camped before
i had never lived alone for any period of time and i'd never slept with sea lions snoring next
but moreover i'd never lived on an uninhabited island punta espinosa is where i lived for over a year and we call it uninhabited because there are no people there but it's alive with life it's hardly uninhabited
so a lot has happened in the last forty years and what i learned when i came to the galapagos is the importance of wild places wild things certainly wildlife
and the amazing qualities that penguins have penguins are real athletes they can swim one hundred and seventy three km in a day they can swim at the same speed day and night
that's faster that any olympic swimmer i mean they can do like seven km an hour and sustain it but what is really amazing because of this deepness here
emperor penguins can go down more than five hundred meters and they can hold their breath for twenty three minutes magellanic penguins the ones that i work on
to about ninety meters and they stay down for about four point six minutes humans without fins ninety meters
the other thing is i've never met anybody that really doesn't say that they like penguins they're comical they walk upright and of course they're diligent and more importantly they're well dressed
so they have all the criteria that people normally like but scientifically they're amazing because they're sentinels they tell us about
our world in a lot of different ways in particular the ocean this is a picture of a galapagos penguin that's on the front of a little zodiac here in the galapagos and that's what i came to study
i thought i was going to study the social behavior of galapagos penguins but you already know penguins are rare
these are the rarest penguins in the world why i thought i was going to be able to do that i don't know but the population has changed dramatically since i was first
when i counted penguins for the first time and tried to do a census we just counted all the individual beaks that we could around all these islands we counted around two thousand so i don't know how many penguins there really are but i know i can count two thousand
if you go and do it now the national parks counts about five hundred so we have a quarter of the penguins that we did forty years ago
and you can imagine sleeping on fernandina your first night there and you hear this lonesomeplaintive call i fell in love with penguins and it certainly has changed the rest of my life
what i found out i was studying is really the difference in how the galapagos changes the most extremevariation you've heard about these el ninos but this is the extreme that penguins all over the world have to adapt to
this is a cold water event called la nina where it's blue and it's green it means the water is really cold
and so you can see this current coming up in this case the humboldt current that comes all the way out to the galapagos islands and this deep undersea current the cromwell current
that upwells around the galapagos that brings all the nutrients when this is cold in the galapagos it's rich and there's plenty of food for everyone when we have extreme el nino events you see all this red
so it's a real desert for not only for the penguins and the sea lions and the marine iguanas things die when there's no food
but we didn't even know that effected the galapagos when i went to study penguins and you can imagine being on an island hoping you're going to see penguins
in the middle of an el nino event and there are no penguins they're not breeding they're not even around i studiedmarine iguanas at that point
but this is a global phenomenon we know that and if you look along the coast of argentina where i work now at a place called punta tombo the largest magellenic penguin colony in the world down here about forty four degrees south latitude
so the oceans don't always act together they act differently but that is the kind of variation that penguins have to live with and it's not easy so when i went to study the magellanic penguins i didn't have any problems there were plenty of them
this is a picture at punta tombo in february showing all the penguins along the beach i went there because the japanese wanted to start harvesting them and turning them into high fashion golf gloves protein and oil
because we have long term studies there and science is important in informing decision makers and also in changing how we do and knowing the direction of change that we're going in
and so we have this penguin project the wildlife conservation society has funded me along with a lot of individuals over the last twenty seven years to be able to produce these kinds of maps
and also we know that it's not only galapagos penguins that are in trouble but magellanics and many other species of penguins and so we have started a global penguin society to try to focus on the real plight of penguins
and this is one of the plights of penguins oil pollution penguins don't like oil and they don't like to swim through oil the nice thing is if you look down here in argentina there's no surface oil pollution from this composite map
but in fact when we went to argentina penguins were often found totally covered in oil
so they were just minding their own business they ended up swimming through ballast water that had oil in it because when tankers carry oil
they have to have ballast at some point so when they're empty they have the ballast water in there when they come back they actually dump this oily ballast water into the ocean why do they do that because it's cheaper
because they don't pay the real environmental costs we usually don 't and we want to start getting the accounting system right so we can pay the real cost at first the argentine government said no there's no way you can't find oil penguins in argentina we have laws
and we can't have illegal dumping it's against the law so we ended up spending nine years convincing the government
these little blue dots are the fledglings we do this survey every march which means they're only in the environment from
and amazingly they changed their laws they moved the tanker lanes forty km farther off shore and people are not doing as much illegal dumping
so what we're seeing now is very few penguins are oiled why are there even these penguins oiled because we've solved the problem in chubut province which is
like a state in argentina where punta tombo is so that's about one thousand km of coastline but we haven't solved the problem in northern argentina
brazil
so now i want to show you that penguins are affected i'm just going to talk about two things this is climate change now this has really been a fun study because i put satellite tags on the back of these magellanic penguins
to convince donors to give you a couple thousand dollars to glue a satellite tag on the back of penguins but we've been doing this now for more than a decade to learn where they go
we thought we needed a marine protected area of about thirty km and then we put the satellite tag on the back of
and what the penguins show us and these are all the little dots from where the penguins positions were for penguins in incubation in two thousand and three and what you see is some of these individuals are going
eight hundred km away from their nests so that means as their mate is sitting on the nest incubating the eggs the other one is out there foraging and the longer they have to stay gone
the worse condition the mate is in when the mate comes back and of course all of this leads to a vicious cycle and you can't raise a lot of chicks here you see in two thousand and three these are all the dots of where the penguins are
of a chick
here you can see in two thousand and six they raised almost three quarters of a chick per nest and you can see that they're closer to punta tombo they're not going as far away
this past year in two thousand and nine you can see that they're now raising about a fourth of a chick and some of these individuals are going more than nine hundred km away from their nests so
you having a job in chicago and then you get transferred to st louis and your mate is not happy about this because you've got to pay airfare
we need to be able to get information out to the general public and so we started a publication with the society for conservation that we think presents cutting edge science in a new novel way because we have reporters
that are good writers that actually can distill the information and make it accessible to the general public so if you're interested in cutting edge science and smarter conservation you should join with our eleven partners
some of them here in this room like the nature conservancy and look at this magazine because we need to get information out about conservation to the general public
okay lastly i want to say that all of you probably have had some relationship at some time in your life with a dog a cat some sort of pet and you recognized that those are individuals and some of you consider them almost part of your family
if you had a relationship with a penguin you'd see it in the same sort of way they're amazing creatures that really change how you view the world
not that different from us they're trying to make a living they're trying to raise their offspring they're trying to get on and survive in the world and this is turbo the penguin
turbo 's never been fed he met us and got his name because he started standing under my diesel truck a turbo truck so we named him turbo
's coming up to one of my graduate students and flipper patting which he would do to a female
and you can see he 's not trying to bite this guy has never been in before and he 's trying to figure out what is going on what is this
this is really pretty weird and you'll see soon that my graduate student and you'll see turbo 's pretty intent on his flipper patting
and now he 's looking at the other guy saying you are really weird and now look at this not friendly so penguins really differ in their personalities just like our dogs and our cats
we're also trying to collect our information and become more technologically literate so we're trying to put that
in computers in the field and penguins are always involved in helping us or not helping us in one way or another this is a radio frequency id system
we put a little piece of rice in the foot of a penguin that has a barcode so it tells you who it is it walks over the pad and you know who it is okay so
here are a few penguins coming in see this one 's coming back to its nest they're all coming in at this time walking across there just kind of leisurely coming in here 's a female that's in a hurry she's really rushing back because it's hot to try to feed her chicks
and then there's another fellow that will leisurely come by look how fat he is he 's walking back to feed his chicks then i realize that they're playing king of the box
this is my box up here and this is the system that works you can see this penguin he goes over he looks at those wires
does not like that wire he unplugs the wire we have no
so they really are pretty amazing creatures
okay
the world and make it better for people as well as penguins so thank you very much
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