| Summary: | Maintenance and Update Frequency: notPlanned Statement: We recorded temperature data from 24 August 2002 (0000 hours) to 1 October 2002 (2300 hours) within a colony of approximately 1,000- 1,200 little penguins nesting on the central part of Penguin Island (32 17'S, 115 41'E), Rockingham, Western Australia (see thumbnail). The sand is too soft for burrows, here Penguins nest in caves of limestone, rock crevices, and under bushes growing on the Island. We recorded temperature inside and outside 7 nest boxes, which were placed along a transect orientated W-NW running approximately along the seacoast. The island was open to tourists between about 1000-1600 hours from May-September, but people had no direct access to the nest boxes. The rectangular plywood boxes, 0.9 x 0.4 x 0.4m, had a removable roof and were surrounded by bushes of sea spinach (Tetragonia decumbens) and true spinifex (Spinifex longifolius). We determined an index of solar exposure using the percentage of the surface of the box (roof and 4 sides) that was in the sun at noon on the day of logger deployment. We used 12-bit-resolution, 16-megabyte-memory, 2-channel UME-TT loggers (Little Leonardo, Tokyo, Japan) to record temperature every minute. Each of these silver, titanium-housed, cylindrical loggers (102 x 20mm, 14g in the air, absolute accuracy for temperature 0.1oC) had 2 thermosensors located at the end of 27.5cm cables that emerged from the end of the logger body. We attached all loggers using marine Tesa tape (Beiersdorf AG, Hamburg, Germany) inside nest boxes, against a wall. We attached inside sensors close to the ground and attached outside sensors on a branch inside the surrounding bush as deep as the cable length permitted (approx. 5-10cm inside the bush). In addition to the data recorded by the loggers, we obtained meteorological data (including average temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity), collected every 3 hours at the meteorological station of Garden Island (32 23'S, 115 68'E), from the regional office of Perth, ...
|
|---|