National Science Foundation
Media Tipsheet
August 26, 1994
Lynn Simarski

About 1,200 tourists visit the Antarctic Peninsula near the U.S. Palmer Research Station every year, and more than 60% of them come in January -- which also happens to be the peak of the breeding season for Adelie penguins.

Biologist William Fraser of Montana State University is now assessing tourists' impact on wildlife in the Palmer area. He cautions that a natural drop in penguin populations across the peninsular region could mislead about tourism's effect. He notes that on Torgerson Island, "wide open" to human visits for years, the Adelie population dropped only 19% in 1992; on nearby, "super-protected" Litchfield Island, the population plummeted 43%

Why are penguins on the unvisited island doing so much worse?

Early conclusions are that natural factors such as greater snowfall, and more effective predation by brown skuas, are hitting the Litchfield Adelies hard. (Most brown skuas in the Palmer area live on Litchfield.) "Tourism could ultimately combine with adverse environmental conditions to severely affect penguins in some areas," Fraser said. "The answer requires the long-term data we're now collecting." A National Science Foundation-funded long-term ecological research study of the region, begun last year, is seeking to plot the ecosystem's natural variability, against which tourism's effects must be measured.