Penguins at large

The Cnes educational project Argonautica aims to help better know the oceans, and understand the climate using satellites resources. Different beacons are thus tracked, and data are provided about the underlying ocean -- altimetry among others. Some of the satellite beacons are tracking animals, like King penguins (IPEV 394 programme, resp.  C.A. Bost , CNRS Chizé).

The King penguins are living in the Southern Ocean. A number of them reproduce on the Crozet archipelago, the two parents taking turn to care for the egg, then for their young. They go from the islands to the open ocean, where they feed, before going back, and so on. During their foraging cruise, they tend to follow ocean currents, and to feed in oceanic fronts. The penguins paths are often seen at the edge of the eddies, between a cold and a warm one, especially in the areas where they slow down to feed. The edge of
anticyclonic (warm-core) eddy presents an elevation of water masses, i.e. a more accessible concentration of prey at shallow depths

Satellite altimetry is one of the tools that can be used to better understand the links between the currents (and more broadly the dynamics of the ocean) and the marine animal behaviors (including foraging).

See also:

• Data: Ssalto/Duacs near-real and delayed time multimission altimeter products
• Image of the Month, August 2001: Currents, buoys and children
• Image of the Month, November 2006: Argonautica buoys around a Tehuantepec eddy
• Applications: Biology

Other websites on this subject:

• Argonautica (in French) 
• CEBC (Chizé Centre for Biological Studies)
  ArgoNIMAUX pages at CEBC (in French)

References:

• Cotte, C., Y.H. Park, C. Guinet, C.A. Bost, Movements of foraging king penguins through
  marine mesoscale eddies, Proc. R. Soc. B (2007) 274, 2385–2391 doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.0775