I’ve had a bit of unexpected vacation and not much to do so to pass the time I hired a ship, collected five breeding pairs of polar bears and arctic foxes (I like arctic foxes, OK?) from the arctic, shipped them to the antarctic, and dropped them off at a penguin breeding colony, picked up a penguin(s) and brought them back to the arctic.
What happens? Will the bears and foxes be able to survive the antarctic winter and spread out, will there be a population explosion until all the penguins, who have no natural land predators, are decimated and then a crash? Or will some sort of equlibrium be established?
As for the penguins in the arctic, I imagine they won’t have nearly the same impact but I’m not sure what will happen there.
There are no land based predators in Antarctica. There’s only marine mammals on the fringe plus some birds like skuas that eat eggs and chicks.
There’s a reason for this. The seal and penguin colonies are seasonal and spread far apart. When the penguins leave, what would a fox eat, let alone a polar bear?
Polar bears can hunt off of ice floes. But Antarctic ice behavior is very different from Arctic. Some Antarctic ice floes have drop-offs dozens of feet high. And they move off into open ocean too easily. Arctic ice tends to hang around in one area and when it moves off, it does so slowly.
The weather conditions are also much, much harsher with the exception of a small part of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Going the other way with penguins there’s some hope. Similar birds such as auks live(d) in the region. But there will be lots and lots of natural predators. Just because an arctic fox never ate a penguin before doesn’t mean it won’t pass one up.
One tricky part is that penguins are very home colony oriented. They need to pick a really good spot right off the bat. Who will they do this? A poor spot and they won’t last.
Plus there’s the zillions of blood sucking skeeters they’ve never had to deal with.
Coincedentally I came across this article today about a 1958 Japanese expedition to Antarctica, they had to leave their dog team behind and on returning almost a year later two had survived.
