Penguins and Sea Lions Help Produce New Atlas

By Samuel Mann

Atlases are usually made and used by people for navigation in parts of the world. They provide accurate information on latitudes, longitudes, water features like lakes and shorelines and terrain features like mountains and valleys that are important for pilots, sailors, or even simple hikers. What you wouldn't expect from an atlas is that is was not made by humans (so-to-speak). The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and BirdLife International have released a new atlas of the Patagonian sea using data that was collected from 16 species of marine animals and produced 280,000 data entries! The Patagonian Sea is a huge body of water from southern Brazil to southern Chile.

The atlas contains the most accurate maps ever assembled for this ecosystem revealing key migratory corridors that span from coastlines to deep-sea feeding areas off the continental shelf hundreds of miles away. The project took 25 scientists 10 years to complete! The list of species tracked for the atlas includes five species of albatross, three species of petrel, four varieties of penguin, two fur seal species, the South American sea lion, and the southern elephant seal.

The significance of this new atlas is that not only was it written by the wildlife that inhabit the area, but it also records marine animal migrations and breeding patters that are important to take into consideration for conservation. This data will be important for managing fisheries and routes for oil tankers that protect important habitats for the marine animals. Conservation is an ever growing concern in life due to the degradation of the ecosystem. What better to preserve the ecosystem than to know just which habitats are the most crucial? This way mariners can plot courses through waters that aren't as vital or fragile.

I think that it is really creative to use the animals that live in an area to plot the land features such as deep water and shorelines. Various animal behaviors require that they travel to certain land features such as deep water feeding, coastal nesting, or perhaps breed grounds. Using GPS on marine animals not only shows their behavioral patterns but also maps out certain geographic features of previously unknown or unfamiliar locations. I think it is ingenious.