A scream from Antarctic.
The decrease of wildlife in sub Antarctic islands of New Zealand
A close up view of hidden climate changes


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The sub Antarctic islands are the first lands after the “ice-desert”. This photo-story takes a visual journey to describe the life of that archipelago the big changes in these apparently untouched microcosms, were climate changes are causing a decline of the unique wildlife. This photo-story takes a visual journey to describe the unique wildlife of that archipelago and the everyday life on board of Tiama, a special sealing vessel, where researchers spend their time in search of little and big changes in these apparently untouched microcosms, looking for the evidences of a relationship between climate changes and wildlife decline. This expedition comes from the idea to report the relationship between climate changes and decline of wildlife ... read more

“This is actually a hard link to make - there are few long-term (decades to hundreds of years) data sets for any conspicuous animals in the NZ sub-Antarctic. But for example, we know that Rock hopper Penguins and Southern Elephant Seals at Campbell Island have both declined in numbers by over 90%during the 1900s (in the case of Rock hopper Penguins, 94% decline between the 1940s and 1980s). So these are clearly dramatic changes, which are not related to commercial fishing but making the link to ‘climate change’ is not straightforward. We have some evidence that levels of productivity in the sub-Antarctic marine system has declined over the same period the penguins declined, but again, being able to link reduced productivity (and hence less food for penguin and there-fore fewer penguins) to some human-induced climate shift is tenuous.)” Dr. David Thomson – NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric researches).Are climate changes in these islands too quick for wildlife to follow them? This is the question that the researchers are trying to reply.