From Erik Lief at ACSH:
The researchers, from the well-known Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered more than 750,000 nesting pairs of the Adélie penguin – or more than 1.5 million in all – on the Danger Islands archipelago, which consists of nine, small land masses spanning 35 kilometers on Antarctica’s northern tip, facing South America.
“Our estimate is more than three times the abundance estimated by an earlier survey,” wrote the study’s authors, “largely because several colonies, not known to exist at the time, were missed entirely.” The paper, published online Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, adds that the population find on the Antarctic Peninsula was “more than the rest of AP region combined, and include the third and fourth largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world.” More.
File under: Birds are smarter than people about surviving ecology changes. They just weren’t in the vicinity.
See also: Australian birds that use fire as a tool