| Summary: | Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 46(20), (2019): 11206-11218, doi:10.1029/2019GL084347. The emperor penguin, an iconic species threatened by projected sea ice loss in Antarctica, has long been considered to forage at the fast ice edge, presumably relying on large/yearly persistent polynyas as their main foraging habitat during the breeding season. Using newly developed fine‐scale sea icescape data and historical penguin tracking data, this study for the first time suggests the importance of less recognized small openings, including cracks, flaw leads and ephemeral short‐term polynyas, as foraging habitats for emperor penguins. The tracking data retrieved from 47 emperor penguins in two different colonies in East Antarctica suggest that those penguins spent 23% of their time in ephemeral polynyas and did not use the large/yearly persistent, well‐studied polynyas, even if they occur much more regularly with predictable locations. These findings challenge our previous understanding of emperor penguin breeding habitats, highlighting the need for incorporating fine‐scale seascape features when assessing the population persistence in a rapidly changing polar environment. This study was supported financially and logistically by the Australian Antarctic Division, the Australian Government's Cooperative Research Centre program through the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, and by the Australian Research Council's Special Research Initiative for Antarctic Gateway Partnership (Project ID SR140300001), the French Polar Institute (Institut Paul Emile Victor, IPEV) research projects, and the postdoctoral scholar award from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. S. J. acknowledges support from NSF award 1744794 and 1643901. C. B. and Y. R.‐C. acknowledge support from the BNP Paribas Foundation as ...
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