A new paper on-line in Nature today reports a 10 year study which shows that when researchers’ put flipper bands on the birds they can seriously dent penguin survival, and also skew the results of research.
Saraux, C. et al. Nature 469, 203-206 (2011)
Flipper banding has been found to hurt penguins: image Benoît Gineste
Attaching bands to penguins’ flippers makes them easier for scientists to study, but may also up the birds’ death rates and lower their chances of reproducing. A team studying king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) has rekindled this debate, which has been running for more than 30 years, and thrown up an additional concern. Not only do bands placed around the birds’ flippers make life more difficult for penguins, their effects also undermine the conclusions drawn from such studies.
Yvon Le Maho at the University of Strasbourg in France, an author of the current study, published in Nature, says that the time has come for ecologists to embrace new technologies and abandon flipper bands, “certainly as a precautionary principle”.
His group’s paper also highlights a wider issue: studies on penguins can and are being used to look at the effects of climate change on ecosystems. Le Maho and colleagues have previously used electronic tagging of king penguins to show that just 0.26 ºC of warming in sea-surface temperatures could trigger a 9% decline in adult survival. If banding were used in such studies, its consequences on a population could cripple attempts to extrapolate a climate-linked trend from the data.
“It’s very difficult to anticipate what the consequences are,” Le Maho says. He says there is a problem with warming affecting ecosystems, but “the numbers have to be reconsidered” where they have been derived from banded studies…..
As long ago as the 1970s, zookeepers noticed that bands could cause wounds on penguins, especially when the birds were moulting……. Despite these findings, bands are still widely used. Le Maho and his colleagues have now added to the debate with their 10-year study. They banded 50 king penguins selected from a population on Possession Island in the southern Indian Ocean that had already been implanted with minute, subcutaneous electronic tags.
When compared with 50 unbanded birds, those fitted with bands had around 40% fewer chicks and a 16% lower survival rate over the study period.
ScienceNews also reports on the study:
And in another worrisome development, the flipper-banded penguins averaged 12.7 days away from home on foraging trips instead of 11.6. “One day or two days is a huge difference,” says ecologist and study coauthor Claire Saraux of the University of Strasbourg and France’s CNRS research network. Chicks back at the breeding site eat only when a parent swims home with food collected hundreds of kilometers, sometimes thousands of kilometers, away. And young chicks have to build up reserves to survive their first winter, when parental food delivery drops off to only a few times during the whole season.
Slower foraging fits with worries that flipper bands may be increasing drag on penguins during swimming, Saraux says. In a swimming test in a tank, an Adélie penguin wearing a band expended 24 percent more energy than an unbanded penguin.
“From an ethical point of view, I think we can’t continue to band,” Saraux says.
Tags: banding damages penguin survival, Banding rings on penguins, King Penguin, Penguin
The k2p blog 
January 14, 2011 at 11:45 am
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