they made their journeys in wooden ships, then man hauling equipment across glaciers, ice floes, mountains and frozen seas surviving on penguin meat when rations ran out. ryan: you might start to smell some sulfur. you smell it? anthony: yeah i smell that sulfur. what s our altitude now? ryan: 13, two. nthony: about 22 miles from mcmurdo is cape royds, where a penguin colony of about 2000 breeding pairs live. marine ecologist, dr. david ainley, has been studying this colony for 20 years. anthony: so you re tagging the young ones? david: right. anthony: do you follow them through their entire life?
cape royds, where a penguin colony of about 2000 breeding pairs live. marine ecologist, dr. david ainley, has been studying this colony for 20 years. anthony: so you re tagging the young ones? david: right. anthony: do you follow them through their entire life? i mean essentially david: yeah, this year we ve got a bunch of individuals that are 20 years old. anthony: why penguins, what brought you to penguin initially? david: well this kind of penguin does everything with no secrets. if you ask the right question and you re creative enough they re going to give you the answer without a lot of guessing. what really interests me is the relationship of the penguins to the ocean and how they fit into the food web. during the 90 s, small colonies like cape royds were increasing much faster than the large colonies where the competition for food was so intense, in the last ten years colonies started increasing again.
reporting from alabama. and here with me now in colorado, a marine ecologist, the first woman to head noaa. welcome, thank you very much. your main concern, you ve got so many concerns, but let s talk first about the toxicity in the water and how the oil spreads vertically throughout the gulf. andrea, it s great to be here with you, the oil is spreading across the surface in patches and some of it is washing ashore. some of it stays beneath the surface and is spreading in the ocean, but in the form of very, very small droplets in concentrations that are fairly dilute. that is primarily right around the vicinity of the well head. and we have we don t yet know what the full consequences of that will be. part of the federal effort is