Revisiting “Penguins in the anthropause: Covid-19 closures drive gentoo penguin movement among breeding colonies”

The Covid-19 pandemic led to a near complete shutdown of the Antarctic tourism industry for two years, providing a natural experiment to test the impact of tourism on Antarctic penguins. An early study using Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) imagery (Flynn et al., 2023) found evidence for rapid gentoo penguin migration into a tourism hotspot during the Covid-19 anthropause, which was notable given the assumed high site-fidelity of this species. Here we present improved methods for processing RPAS imagery and, from the improved imagery, an updated interpretation of gentoo breeding behavior during this period. This re-analysis revealed that fewer penguins successfully established nests at the tourist hotspot than was originally reported, instead, high levels of penguins not on nests were present onshore. This may indicate an increased presence of subadults or non-breeding adults, movement of individuals to new locations during the Covid-19 anthropause without successfully establishing nests, or delayed nesting from increased snowfall. Overall, there was a decline in nests in the metapopulation during anthropause. This re-analysis sheds new light on penguin attendance and movement during this unusual period of suspended tourism and indicates that any tourism impact studies involving rotating closures would need to extend over several seasons for responses with time lags to fully manifest. While the core findings of Flynn et al. (2023) – that the cessation of tourism coincided with an unexpected shift in breeding patterns of gentoo penguins – remain true, our re-analysis provides a more nuanced perspective on the impacts of the Covid anthropause.