The Emperor’s Domain: Adaptations & Energetic Requirements for Life on the Ice

• Main Author: Natalie Pilcher
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica; Aptenodytes forsteri; Emperor penguins
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.596.1337; http://www.anta.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/GCAS electronic projects/GCAS 10 Reveiws/Natalie Pilcher Review.pdf

The Antarctic environment is renowned for being among the most extreme on earth, presenting a range of challenges to any organism living there. One of the most successful species to do so is the Emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri). Emperor penguins owe this capability to the evolution of a variety of anatomical, physiological and behavioural adaptations. This review sets out to explore the relationship between some of these adaptations, as well as the energetic requirements for living and breeding on the ice. Evolution Emperor penguins live at an average latitude of 66.7°S where temperatures drop to around-60°C and wind gusts reach 180 kilometres per hour (Croxall and Davis 1999). However, the emperor penguin or its ancestors did not always live in such an environment. Penguins evolved in the Cretaceous (between 140-65 million years ago), when the earth was generally warmer than it is at present (Baker et al. 2006). Aptenodytes is thought to be the basal penguin lineage from which other extant genera diverged, and as temperatures decreased most of these genera were either already further north or migrated north and adapted to the conditions there. However, Aptenodytes and Pygoscelis remained in Antarctica and adapted through the process of natural selection to the climate as it changed (Baker et al. 2006).