IN 1929 Australian adventurer and photographer Frank Hurley snapped a picture of the bleak landscape of Heard Island, in the bitterly cold Southern Ocean. He recorded for posterity a thriving colony of photogenic macaroni penguins as well as the rocky site, Erratic Point.

Seventy-one years later, seabird ecologist Eric Woehler stood where Hurley had placed his tripod. With a click of the shutter the University of Tasmania scientist captured the same view: rocks, coastline, ocean, penguins. It was the same, but different.

"In the late 1920s there were about 250 breeding pairs," says Woehler. "But when I was there in 2000 the colony was less than 20 pairs and grass had grown around the edge of the colony."

This is hardly the world-saving stuff of Hollywood-style Happy Feet takes on one of the most lovable creatures on the planet. In fact, like his US colleagues Susie Ellis, Dee Boersma and Elizabeth Skewgar, Woehler fears that the past and the present signal a worrisome future for the world's 17 species of penguins.

"They face serious population decreases throughout their range," the team writes in Conservation Status of the World's Penguins, a report that Ellis presented this week at the sixth International Penguin Conference, meeting in Hobart.

Going further, the researchers use words unusual in scientific discourse: "grim progression", "disconcerting decrease" and dire. All up, Woehler and company conclude that unless scientists, governments, conservation groups and the public take immediate action to reverse the trend, penguin populations will plummet. Many species face extinction.

That's more than a tragedy for the seabirds themselves, Woehler says. "Penguins are the bellwether of climate change. As birds they're pretty much at the top of the food chain and act as two-footed bio-indicators of the health of the environment, marine and terrestrial," he says.

Seabird ecologist Shaye Wolf - with the non-governmental organisation the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco - agrees. She says 12 species are in immediate danger, among them Antarctica's legendary emperor penguins. "The emperor colony at Pointe Geologie, immortalised in the film March of the Penguins, has declined by over 50 per cent since the 1960s," says Wolfe, in Australia for the meeting.

According to Wolf, the CBD is so concerned that earlier this year it pushed the US Fish and Wildlife Service to list 12 species on the federal list of endangered and threatened wildlife and plants. The service recently agreed that listing may be warranted for 10 species - from emperors and macaronis to rockhoppers and yellow-eyed penguins - and will begin reviewing scientific, public and commercial submissions this month. Listed species qualify for research and conservation funding and legally mandated measures designed to reduce threats such as commercial fishing, so it's more than a symbolic statement, Wolfe says.

It's difficult to imagine that these charismatic seabirds are in peril. After all, most live on isolated sub-Antarctic islands such as Heard, the frigid tips of the southern continents or the Antarctic continent itself. But as Woehler says, "the list of threats is phenomenal". He ticks them off: habitat loss, human disturbance, competition from commercial fisheries, oil spills, marine pollution and predation by foxes and dogs. Finally, there's the big one: global warming.

Penguins may look miserable huddling against freezing winds, but for them cold weather is good weather, says Phil Lyver, an avian ecologist with Land Care Research, a quasi-governmental body in New Zealand. All species are dependent upon the cold Antarctic circumpolar current, rich in krill, fish and other nutritious foods. Even penguins that live as far north as the Galapagos Islands survive because cold currents linked to the ACC pass nearby.

Others such as emperors and adelies - the only species found on the Antarctic continent - also need sea ice. "They need sea ice to forage, like a floating island," explains Lyver, adding that krill, a favoured food, thrive under sheets of sea ice.

He says that because climate change is "very patchy", the sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula is melting, while there's too much winter ice in the Ross Sea, where he and his US colleagues monitor adelie penguins. "The sea ice there is taking penguins beyond the ACC, the productive area," Lyver says. The result: poorly nourished adults less able to breed and chicks unable to thrive.

Warming may also have triggered the break-up of the Ross Sea ice shelf. In March 2000 the 20km by 40km B-15 iceberg broke off the shelf, locking in the sea ice for three consecutive breeding seasons and creating a huge distance from land where penguins nest to the edge of the sea ice where they forage. Usually the ice shrinks towards the coast during the summer breeding season, allowing adults to make quick foraging runs to feed their chicks. "But (those years) the penguins had to walk," recalls Lyver.

"It took three days to walk to the edge of the ice and back. Normally it takes only a few hours. They couldn't provision chicks," says Lyver, who predicts a drop in penguin numbers in the next few years from low chick survival. Wolf adds that due to the mega-iceberg the entire colony of 1200 emperor penguins at Cape Crozier on Ross Island failed to reproduce in the summer of 2001-02.

Still, Lyver claims Ross Sea penguins have suffered little from human activity, compared with populations elsewhere. This gives scientists an opportunity to gather baseline data on the ebbs and flows of natural penguin life before human contact.

As University of Tasmania doctoral student Phillippa Bricher has shown, just living near people can put a damper on penguin numbers, even if the neighbours are well-behaved scientists like those at Australia's Casey Station on Bailey Peninsula.

Using geographic information systems and spatial landscape data, Bricher sorted natural variation from human impacts on colonies of adelie penguins living on the Antarctic continent. She found the colonies protected from people have increased on average 600 per cent since 1960. Those situated near Casey Station grew by less than 15 per cent or not at all in some years.

According to Woehler, the findings are troubling, especially as tourism to the Antarctic Peninsula, in particular, has skyrocketed in recent years. "There are more than 25,000 tourists in a three-month (summer) window," he says. "The science and support staff is less than 5000."

But Woehler says steps can be taken to reduce the downside of tourism. Right now, the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators is talking with Antarctic Treaty nations such as Australia, New Zealand and the US about methods of regulating and monitoring the industry's activities. Woehler is also passionate about direct action closer to home. Case in point: little penguins such as those that enthral visitors to Victoria's Phillip Island.

The penguins also establish colonies along the Tasmanian and NSW coastlines. "There's direct competition between humans and penguins for coastal residential areas," he says, predicting greater conflict as sea levels rise and intense storms increase in a warming world.

"We need to incorporate a buffer zone into coastal planning," says Woehler. "We must also put greater effort into controlling predators. Foxes are efficient predators and dogs are capable of killing a penguin just by closing its jaw on the penguin's skull. Here in Tasmania every few years we get a big dog kill (of penguins). A few years ago 50 to 60 penguins were killed by dogs in one night." Physical leashes for dogs, conceptual leashes for tourists and fishing boats, buffer zones and marine parks: these and other conservation strategies are in the scientific spotlight thisweek.

As the conference convener, Woehler wants action plans to emerge from this week's meeting, as well as details about the latest research. That's so because while it's not possible to turn the clock back to 1929 - and although experts agree the risk to penguins worldwide is grave - researchers are confident that a strategic global effort could keep penguins in the photo frame for the next generation of adventurers, photographers, scientists and penguin fans. If so, that really would be the stuff of Happy Feet. Leigh Dayton is The Australian's science writer.
(The Australian, 10/09/2007)