Now worries about the decline and extinction of penguins have subsided!
They discovered a "huge colony" previously unknown to the Adele penguins in Antarctica.
Where the impact of climate change and human activity is less than other parts of Antarctica. The islands are located on the southern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and are very far away, surrounded by thick sea ice, according to The Independent.
Until recently, the islands were not known to be an important habitat for penguins," said Heather Lynch, an ecologist at Stony Brook University who co-led the work.
But the situation changed when scientists noticed a bird's nest in NASA satellite images, a sign of a giant colony of penguins. Lynch led a team to the islands to investigate, to assess the status of the birds on Earth, and to promise them by using drones to take pictures To the island from the top.
The UAVs allow to fly in a network around the island, take pictures at a rate per second, and then connect images to each other. The whole earth mass appears in two- and three-dimensional images. Once these huge images are created, scientists use neural network programs to analyze and search for The nests of the penguins are self-contained.
The number of pairs of penguins living on the island to 751527 pairs, or about 1.5 million penguins, more than the number of couples on the Antarctic Peninsula combined.
"The islands of danger contain not only the largest number of Adeli penguins in the Antarctic, but they do not seem to suffer from the decreasing number of penguins on the western side of the peninsula associated with change," said Michelle Bolito, an environmental scientist at the Louisiana State University. Modern climate .
"This discovery places the east of the Antarctic Peninsula in stark contrast to the decline in the number of Adele penguins and chin-shaped penguins in the western peninsula," said Tom Hart, a penguins researcher at Oxford University.
He explained that the reasons for this decline in numbers are not clear; but the most prominent causes are possible climate change, fishing, and direct human intervention, but this does not show the magnitude of the problem, according to the journal Scientific Reports.
This striking contrast suggests that penguins are better off when their environment is far from disturbed, a discovery that supports calls by environmentalists for a protected area in the Wadl Sea, where the islands of danger lie.