Iceberg crashes into Antarctica; 150k penguins dead

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Oddly enough, I actually want to try penguin meat for myself. I mean, I've heard it's disgusting, but still. I've heard puffins taste pretty similar, and they aren't subject to the same laws against their consumption.

Linux will not stand for this.

Who do you think saved them?

(I'm imagining Linus looking up from his laptop and saying, "Oh, NO!" - then he rushes out, builds a helicopter from scratch and moves them all 20 miles to the seashore. Meanwhile, RMS is still arguing that although 'penguins want to be free", it has to be done in a pure way and no proprietary products should be used in the rescue operation. Eventually, RedHat & Ubuntu get involved and try to monetize/corporatize the whole thing via "penguin support contracts" just as Torvalds is finishing up and drinking a beer.)

Turn out they moved out, though they did had to abandon their eggs and chicks.
http://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/societe/2016/02/25/003-manchots-adelie-antarctique-iceberg-reproduction-elevage.shtml (Sorry that it's a french article.)

RMS wouldn't call software a product

Touche' ! That was dead-on & thank you for the smile this morning, I sorta needed it!

Yesterday the BBC carried an article titled "Antartica: Thousand of Emperor Penguins Chicks Wiped Out".

The article said:

Thousands of emperor penguin chicks drowned when the sea-ice on which they were being raised was destroyed in severe weather. The catastrophe occurred in 2016 in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. Scientists say the colony at the edge of the Brunt Ice Shelf has collapsed with adult birds showing no sign of trying to re-establish the population. But the Brunt population, which had sustained an average of 14,000 to 25,000 breeding pairs for several decades (5-9% of the global population), essentially disappeared overnight.

Strangely the BBC forgot to mention the key factor. This is the Abstract of the Fretwell & Trathan paper:

Satellite imagery is used to show that the world’s second largest emperor penguin colony, at Halley Bay, has suffered three years of almost total breeding failure. Although, like all emperor colonies, there has been large inter-annual variability in the breeding success at this site, the prolonged period of failure is unprecedented in the historical record. The observed events followed the early breakup of the fast ice in the ice creeks that the birds habitually used for breeding. The initial breakup was associated with a particularly stormy period in September 2015, which corresponded with the strongest El Niño in over 60 years, strong winds, and a record low sea-ice year locally. Conditions have not recovered in the two years since. Meanwhile, during the same three-year period, the nearby Dawson-Lambton colony, 55 km to the south, has seen a more than tenfold increase in penguin numbers. The authors associate this with immigration from the birds previously breeding at Halley Bay. Studying this ‘tale of two cities’ provides valuable information relevant to modelling penguin movement under future climate change scenarios.

The authors describe an unprecedented three-year period of breeding failure at the large Halley Bay emperor penguin colony. They link this to a dramatic rise in the population of the nearby Dawson-Lambton colony, a rise that can only have occurred due to immigration from Halley. These changes have been driven by a change in sea-ice conditions and early breakup of fast ice on the northern side of the Brunt Ice Shelf, which may be due to ENSO events and/or ice-shelf morphology.

Source: Emperor Penguins “Wiped Out”

So the answer is that when species are threatened by adverse climate conditions they relocate to a more desirable location, they migrate. And that is what happened to the penguins.