All bands are not created equal. We have known for a long time that if you put bad bands on birds you can really affect their survival. Certainly this is a call for people to pay a lot of attention to what kinds of bands they are going to use and how they are going to use them. |
By gathering this detailed history of recovery plans, we expect we'll be able to say quite a bit about how they've evolved over time and their effectiveness. |
I'm certainly not at all convinced that the Galapagos penguin is going to go extinct because of this. But I am concerned that the numbers are going to become increasingly low, and we know that with smaller populations they're just more vulnerable to extinction. |
It's been going on for decades and it's having a long-term negative effect on wildlife. Penguins can live a long time with oil, but that's not true of most seabirds. Our findings appear to be just the tip of the iceberg. |
Nobody has really done a thorough review to characterize the recovery plans. |
The islands were very lush, green and verdant, which is unusual. It's like the ocean is the desert right now and the land is the garden. It's usually the other way around. |
This is laying the groundwork of future, more extensive review of the recovery planning process. |
We know when penguins get heavily oiled they tend to seek the shore because that's their thermal neutral zone. But when they are on shore they can't feed and so they starve to death. |
Whenever you do science it's important to know individuals. And that means you have to distinguish one from another, just like we give names to people we have to be able to give names to penguins. And we often do that with bands. |