Punta Tombo – Center for Ecosystem Sentinels

Updates from the Field: Tombo Jan-Feb 2024

We continued our Punta Tombo field season this winter with graduate student Erik Johansson, former undergrad lab member Chloe Rabinowitz, and program coordinator Kalyna Durbak staying on site from January 12 through February 21. Our goal for this trip was to attach GTA* and GPS tags on adult penguins who were actively feeding chicks in order to log their foraging trips. Since the tags did not actively transmit data, they had to be retrieved after about two weeks of use. The tags were deployed 41 times throughout the field work trip; 31 GTA deployments and 10 GPS deployments. Center researchers […]

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Field updates: Argentina, April 2023

Photo credit: Eric Wagner Thanks to the generous support of Zoo Augsburg in Germany, Dr. Ginger Rebstock and Dr. Eric Wagner were able to return to Punta Tombo for a couple of weeks in April. There, they put twenty satellite tags on penguins—ten females and ten males—that were about to start their post-breeding migration. From last year’s tagging effort, we know that females hug the coast more than males as they swim north, and pairs do not migrate together. Now we are trying to get a better sense of whether females and males use the same routes consistently from one

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Field Updates: Argentina, Winter 2023

Abrahms Lab, Boersma Lab, Updates from the Field / February 28, 2023

In January and February of 2023 Dr. Dee Boersma, along with PhD students Katie Holt (Boersma Lab) and Erik Johansson (Abrahms Lab), spent six weeks in Punta Tombo to set up the remote scales that weigh penguins on their way in and out of the breeding area, and followed 19 penguins using GPS tags. The three of them were also able to complete the annual colony-wide surveys at Punta Tombo and nearby Cabo Dos Bahias.

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