September’s Conservation Week was celebrated on the West Coast with a Conservation Fair at Carters Beach and the Trust took part with the fun but serious climate challenge, Keep it Cool.
With one player dressed as a penguin and donning several woolly jumpers, the other player tossed a toy Tawaki on a sheet covered with climate cooling and warming actions. If the Tawaki landed on a cooling action the penguin could remove a jumper, but landing on a warming action meant the overheated penguin had to add yet another woolly layer. In the warm sun, the penguin players were very relieved to shed the woolly clothing with cooling actions.
Recent marine heatwaves in the Tasman Sea can be attributed to global warming. In the summers of 2018 and again in 2019, the sea-surface temperatures (SST) off the West Coast were a staggering 3 – 6oC above average. Penguins may be particularly sensitive to warming SST with disruption to ocean currents and food supply, along with other warming effects of heat stress on land during the breeding season and increased rainfall resulting in greater sediment runoff, increasing ocean turbidity and making it harder to hunt for fish. The Trust’s ongoing GPS tracking studies of Kororā is an important piece of work to understand foraging trends and how we may be able to help penguins in the face of these serious climate change threats.
