Climate Witness: Alex Bocage de Almeida, Brazil

Posted on 2 December 2008

When Alex Bocage de Almeida was windsurfing in Ilhabela, São Paulo, Brazil, he witnessed an unusual event when dozens of penguins surrounded him. A temperature rise in the Malvinas had diminished their feeding grounds, and these penguins had swum the length of South America in search of food.

My name is Alex Bocage de Almeida. I am 28 years old and I live in Neuchâtel Switzerland. I was born in São Paulo, Brazil and lived there for 23 years.

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I never really imagined how the increase of 1C in the Earth’s atmosphere could affect my life. For me it does not change if my house heats more than 1C, if the coffee or if the shower is 1C warmer but I am sharing something unusual that I witnessed that and I think was caused by the fact that the Malvinas currents got +1C warmer. For us humans at the moment +1C may not be so much but for our planet it seems quite a lot.

I have always had close contact with nature, either through diving, swimming, sailing or just being at the beach and relaxing. One of my biggest passions in life is sailing and that is why I decided to make it part of my work, travelling the world doing the communications for the majors sailing events.

Penguins in São Paulo

In july this year I was in Ilhabela, São Paulo, Brazil for a sailing event. On my day off I had the chance to witness what many of the sailors had been talking about the whole week. Standing on my windsurf board in the middle of Ilhabela channel I saw a penguin. After a few minutes the one black and white spot turned into 20. I stopped sailing, sat on my board and stared at them. They were not afraid. It was amazing, there I was without any wetsuit with penguins around me, a really a unique experience but at the same time frighting to think that I was sharing the same waters with birds that are usually found in Antarctica.

I have seen penguins before in Brazil, I believed it was normal, but just a few and only on beaches in the south of Brazil where the water is colder, not 20 in Ilhabela, an island located in the São Paulo coast. Having been sailing in Ilhabela regularly I knew that this experience was unusual.

Speaking with some locals from the area I realized that in fact the number of peguins in Ilhabela has increased significantly in recent years. A local from Ilhabela and Kitesurf School coordinator, Renato Spiritus said this year was certainly the record for the number of penguins he had ever seen in these waters. “There were around 30 or more together in October when usually just a couple may be seen from July until Septmeber. This year I saw some tourist trying to help a few penguins by calling an organization to help relocate them.”

Thousands of penguins appear in northern Brazil for the first time

When I searched for information I found an article in a Brazilian newspaper which said that this year was a record for the number of penguins found on the Brazilian beaches. Two thousand penguins were counted this year in the state of Rio de Janeiro, 1600 in Salvador, Bahia in the north of Brazil, but half of them were dead already from starvation.

The penguins are called Magellanic penguins and are from the southern Argentine coasts, which means they swam almost the whole coast of South America to end up in northern Brazil.

According to Valéria Ruoppolo, the emergency relief officer for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, finding penguins on Brazilian beaches means that something is wrong in the natural order. Their studies proved that the Malvinas currents were +1C warmer in the winter of 2008 causing sardines to swim deeper and making the Magellanic penguins to go further north to find more food.

Ruoppolo also mentioned that all the Magellanic penguins found in the Brazilian coast were young and most of them were starving and with oil on their feathers. From 800 penguins captured in São Paulo only 93 were healthy enough to be taken by plane to South of Brazil so they could find their way home and migrate back to Patagonia. Even after surviving this quest for food they have to face another problem as they are now late for their reproduction cycle.

The situation is apparently very critical with overfishing, ocean contamination and climate change all contributing to what I have witnessed.

Scientific review

Reviewed by: Dr Claudio G. Menéndez, National Council of Research of Argentina (CONICET), Argentina

It is normal for Magellanic penguins to breed in large colonies in southern Argentina and to migrate north as far as southern Brazil in search of food. What has changed is that they are increasingly unable to return home because they get sick, weak, or disoriented for reasons that have yet to be determined.

The climate variability in the western South Atlantic is a possible factor to consider. Penguins are possibly being confused by shifting ocean currents and temperatures. The variability in the southward extension of the subtropical anticyclone and in the intensity of the westerly winds drives changes in the ocean mass transport. This results in variability in the intensity of the Malvinas current and in the position of the Brazil–Malvinas confluence zone. This is consistent with the projected poleward expansion of the subtropical highs and the poleward displacement of the mid-latitude westerlies reported in the recent fourth IPCC assessment. Moreover, an anomalously stronger or weaker Malvinas Current causes sea surface temperature anomalies in the subtropical western South Atlantic.

Of course, other factors could contribute to alter the birds’ behavior. Pollution of the ocean could cause the penguins to get sick and become disoriented. In addition overfishing could disrupt the penguins' natural food chain, forcing them to swim longer distances to find fish.

Dee Boersma P., 2008: Penguins as Marine Sentinels. BioScience, Vol. 58 No. 7, doi:10.1641/B580707
Wainer I. and S.A. Venegas, 2002: South Atlantic Multidecadal Variability in the Climate System Model. Journal of Climate, 15, 1408-1420.
IPCC AR4: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.
http://mesh.biology.washington.edu/penguinProject/TrackingPenguins
http://www.penguinstudies.org

All articles are subject to scientific review by a member of the Climate Witness Science Advisory Panel.

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