earthlingA modern dancer, Nadia Haq. Category: Comedy Bird Photo - Gold award winner
bioGraphicMirror, mirror, in the snow, who’s the prettiest penguin of them all?
It's #NationalPenguinAwarenessDay in the US, so we're sharing a recent story about wild Adélie penguins that might be self-aware. 🐧🪞❄️
#Penguins #Mirror #MirrorTest #AdeliePenguins #Intelligence #SelfAwareness #Antarctica
https://hakaimagazine.com/news/penguins-may-have-passed-the-mirror-test/
ViolaIt’s been many years since I’ve been to #Antarctica, but projects B031 & B200 continue to collect long term data on the ecology of #AdéliePenguins, #populationdynamics, #foragingbehavior, and #climatechange. Project people are now in the field and ready for a new season, with new GPS/Sat/dive tags ready to go. Here is a 2021 paper from our team: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02451-4? Pics: Adélies on sea ice (©️Viola Toniolo), graphic of a weighbridge foraging cycle, new tags.
Foraging dive frequency predicts body mass gain in the Adélie penguin - Scientific Reports
Quantifying food intake in wild animals is crucial to many ecological and evolutionary questions, yet it can be very challenging, especially in the marine environment. Because foraging behavior can be inferred from dive recordings in many marine creatures, we hypothesized that specific behavioral dive variables can indicate food intake. To test this hypothesis, we attached time-depth recorders to breeding Adélie penguins also implanted with RFID tags that crossed a weighbridge as they traveled to and from the ocean to feed their chicks. The weighbridge reported how much mass the penguin had gained during a foraging trip. The variables that explained a significant amount of the change in body mass while at sea were the number of foraging dives per hour (46%) and the number of undulations per hour (12%). Most importantly, every increment of 1 in the rate of foraging dives per hour equated to a penguin gaining an average 170 g of mass, over the course of a 6–60 h foraging trip. These results add to a growing understanding that different metrics of foraging success are likely appropriate for different species, and that assessing the types and frequencies of dives using time-depth recorders can yield valuable insights.
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#UrbanGardens
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#WildFermentation
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#ClimateAdaptation
#ClimateResilience #RenewableEnergy #Geology #Science #Engineering #Cats #Meditation #UrbanEcology
#UrbanGardens
#SoilEcology
#AdeliePenguins
#WildFermentation
#CANativePlants
#Astronomy
#MarineEcology
#AntarcticScience
#MountTamalpais
#SexPositive
#SocialJustice
#Polyamory
#BlackLivesMatter
#TransLivesMatter