The non-disaster of 150,000 missing penguins? They just went somewhere else.

JoNova(Australia)
Credit to Becky Oskin at Live Science for unpacking the hype, getting two points of view and finding a researcher who knew something:

But there’s no proof yet that the birds are dead. No one has actually found 150,000 frozen penguins. In fact, experts think there’s a less horrific explanation for the missing birds: When the fishing gets tough, penguins simply pick up and move. It wouldn’t be the first time Adélie penguins marched to new digs. When an iceberg grounded in the southern Ross Sea in 2001, penguins on Ross Island relocated to nearby colonies until the ice broke up.

“Just because there are a lot fewer birds observed doesn’t automatically mean the ones that were there before have perished,” said Michelle LaRue, a penguin population researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not involved in the study. “They easily could have moved elsewhere, which would make sense if nearby colonies are thriving,” LaRue told Live Science in an email interview.

As for the dead birds, La Rue explained that there are always carcasses lying around Antarctica because it’s so cold and dry (they don’t decompose in the freezer so to speak). You might think an expert like Chris Turney might know that? It appears Eric Worrall, non-penguin-researcher, and not published at all in the peer review literature on Antarctica thought the non-migration of Penguins facing disaster was “ridiculous”. (WUWT)"