Extreme Snowstorms, Climate Change Hinder Breeding Season for Antarctic Birds

A recent study demonstrated how the breeding season for Antarctic birds has been hampered by climate change and extreme snowstorms.

Polar seabirds have evolved to withstand the particularly harsh conditions found in the Antarctic.

The icy land mass is the highest, coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth, according to Live Science, but despite the difficulties, these polar birds manage to survive there.

Climate Change and Extreme Snowstorms

But even so, they are finding it impossible to handle the extremes brought on by climate change.

According to a recent study, during the peak breeding season for Antarctic birds from December 2021 to January 2022, researchers did not discover any nests in regions where colonies typically number in the hundreds of thousands of birds.

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense as a result of climate change, and the majority of these events have some sort of detrimental effect on wildlife.

According to the study's authors, such occurrences in polar environments include heat waves, unusually high sea ice concentrations, and extreme snowstorms.

Extreme weather events are thought to only have an impact on a portion of the population, even though they have an impact on other demographic rates and the ability of polar seabirds to reproduce.

Extreme environmental conditions rarely cause an entire population to completely fail at breeding.

Hindered Breeding for Antarctic Birds

The study, which was recently published in the journal Current Biology, details how extreme snowstorms in Dronning Maud Land in late 2021 and early 2022 resulted in nearly total and widespread failures of the three most prevalent seabird species to reproduce.

This includes Snow petrel, Antarctic petrel, and South polar skua.

Sebastien Descamps, the study's first author and a researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute, noted that during storms, a seabird colony will lose some chicks and eggs, which will reduce breeding success.

But in this case, there are tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of birds, and not a single one of them reproduced throughout the frigid storms.

Descamps added that it is genuinely unexpected to have no breeding success.

Dronning Maud Land in Antarctica, which includes Svarthamaren and the neighboring Jutulsessen, is the subject of the research.

Two of the biggest Antarctic petrel colonies in the world can be found in these regions.

They are also crucial locations for south polar skua and snow petrels to lay their eggs.

Svarthamaren and Jutulsessen

According to the study, around 20,000 to 200,000 Antarctic petrel nests, 2,000 snow petrel nests, and more than 100 skua nests per year were found in Svarthamaren from 1985 to 2020.

Svarthamaren has long been referred to as the largest antarctic petrel colony in the world, but during the breeding seasons of 2021 and 2022, only three breeding Antarctic petrels, a small number of breeding snow petrels, and no skua nests were observed.

Even with tens of thousands of live nests in past years, Jutulsessen had no Antarctic petrel nests in the summers of 2021 and 2022.

According to Descamps, a really large portion of the land was affected by these stormy conditions, which also had an impact on the breeding success of a sizable portion of the Antarctic petrel population.

For birds like these, which lay their eggs directly on the ground, an excessive amount of snow makes it difficult to access the ground and raise chicks.

The birds must use their limited strength to find shelter, stay warm, and conserve energy as a result of the extreme snowstorms.

Descamps noted that, until recently, Antarctica showed no overt signs of climate warming, except for the peninsula.

However, in recent years, new research and extreme weather events have begun to change how climate change in Antarctica is perceived, Treehugger reported.