P. Dee Boersma,a University of Washington conservation biologist,is the Jane Goodall of penguins. As director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Penguin Project,Boersma,62,has spent the last quarter of a century studying the behaviours of some 40,000 Magellanic penguins,inhabitants of one stretch of beach in southern Argentina. Excerpts from an interview with her: How did the Penguin Project begin?In the early 1980s,when a Japanese company approached the Argentine government for permission to harvest their penguins and turn them into oil,protein and gloves,there was a public outcry and the military regime decided,"Let's have a study." Not long after that,the Wildlife Conservation Society entered into an agreement with the Argentine Office of Tourism and the Province of Chubut to set up a research project at Punta Tombo where there was the world's largest colony of Magellanic penguins. I came to Punta Tombo in 1982 to determine how many penguins were actually there. I didn't think I'd be doing a long-term study of them. But we didn't know how long wild penguins lived. With time,we discovered that penguins are quite long-lived,30 years,more. So I've ended up going to Argentina every year since 1982. What does your research involve?I'm a kind of census taker of the 200,000 breeding pairs of penguins at Punta Tombo. I track who is at home,who gets to mate,where the penguins go for the meals,their health,their behaviours.On a typical day,I'll get up before dawn. The penguins rise early,but they spend the morning calling to each other from their nests and socialising. Around 8 or 9,they head down to the beach. Once they're out,we check the nests,see who's stayed behind,weigh the babies,band them,and we put satellite tags on some birds so we can track them while they're swimming. Through the tagging we've been able to show that in the last decade,the birds are swimming about 25 miles further in search of food. They're having trouble finding enough fish to eat.These penguins are now laying eggs three days later in the season then they did a decade ago. That means that the chicks may leave for sea at more inopportune times,when fish may not be close to the colony. The Punta Tombo colony has declined 22 per cent since 1987. This type of penguin is considered near-threatened. Of the 17 different penguin species,12 are suffering rapid decreases in numbers. Why is this decline occurring among the Magellanic penguins?Changes in the availability of prey due to both climate change and exploitation of the penguins' food sources by commercial fisheries. There's also oil pollution in the South Atlantic. There's dumping from ships. For a while in the 1980s,80 per cent of the dead penguins found along the coast were covered in oil. In 1994,we were able to get the Chubut authorities to move the oil tanker lanes further from the coast. That's helped.But as the birds take these longer migrations in search of food,they sometimes find themselves outside of Chubut's protected areas. Some of our tagged penguins have been located as far north as Brazil. The 2005 documentary film,The March of the Penguins,was an international success. Do you understand why? Because people can identify with penguins. These birds are curious. They walk upright. They dress well. They're highly social. They know their neighbours. They mate. And some of them even get divorced. When we do our census,we find individuals with mates other than those they had the year before-and they are living within meters of the old mates. That's more likely to happen if the couple has failed at raising a chick. And yet,we find other pairs with great fidelity. We have one pair that stayed together for 16 years. What's really interesting is that if the penguins keep the same mate,they raise more chicks. Fidelity gives them greater evolutionary success._C. CLAIBORNE RAY
