Research

Background
The Magellanic penguin project was started in 1982 as a result of a Japanese company's intention to harvest Magellanic penguins and turn them into golf gloves, meat and oil. The Wildlife Conservation Society with the Province of Chubut through the office of tourism entered into a joint agreement to protect the largest Magellanic penguin colony in the world and study the diversity of wildlife at Punta Tombo. The project provides recommendations to the Province to educate tourists on conservation problems and to improve the visitor experience of the more than 125,000 people that visit each year. Based at the provincial reserve at Punta Tombo, Argentina a small group of researchers under the direction of Dr. Dee Boersma, Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, follow individual penguins, monitor the colony and develop the data needed to plan effective conservation efforts, as well as try and understand the importance of penguins as indicators of global climate change and the health of the environment.

Read about the human aspect, threats, and important next steps for helping the Magellanic Penguins.

Research at Punta Tombo
Every year between September and March, the Penguin Project research team follows hundreds of individual penguins to learn where they go, what they eat, and how they survive to the next breeding season.  These data are key to understanding how climate variation impacts penguins and how to mitigate conflicts between humans and wildlife.  Students educated at Punta Tombo are now leaders in conservation in the United States and Argentina.

For the last two decades Dr. Boersma and her volunteers have identified penguins at Punta Tombo with nametags in the form of flipper bands. Each penguin gets a small metal band with a number on it, so as researchers walk the beaches recording data, they can tell who's who. The project has banded over 50,000 birds since 1983.

Penguins are at the breeding colony during the spring and summer, from September to March, when researchers visit each nest and determine how each couple does raising their chicks. A few birds, who have a reputation of being good 'Dads', get a satellite tag so that we can see where birds are going in search of food. By studying penguins while they are at sea we are able to learn where they go and why some birds are successful and others unsuccessful at rearing chicks.

Projects

Follow the Penguins
During the week of August 20, 2007, Professor Boersma and her student, Elizabeth Skewgar, selected six adult male penguins from a group of oiled penguins at two coastal towns in Northern Argentina--San Clemente del Tuyú and Mar del Plata--to carry satellite transmitters during their southern migration back to their breeding colonies. They put the transmitters on healthy, robust birds in good body condition that were likely to be eager to get back to their colony to begin breeding. The point was to follow their ocean route and determine if they are going south along a well-defined route. 

Follow the penguins' migration in Elizabeth Skewgar's study.