#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The Republic of Saha (Yakutia)’s head of Aisen Nikolayev made this statement on Monday. The Telegram channel Explanatory Marine Dictionary quotes his words.
“Despite years of educational work, many of our fellow citizens still believe that penguins are the closest neighbors of polar bears. We are not going to dissuade them. Moreover, we already have bison, why not penguins”, the republic head Aisen Nikolaev commented.
The first three ‘migrants’ from Antarctica – penguins named Pik, Pak and Pook – have already been delivered to the republic. According to specialists from the Arctic and Antarctic Institute (AARI), the penguins survived the move normally and are successfully settling into the Yakut North.
In 1936, Norwegian researcher Lars Christensen had settled several dozen penguins on the northern coast of Norway. The bird population died out there by the mid-1940s. Although there were not only polar bears on the local coast, but even more or less large predators, including domestic dogs and cats.
One of the main reasons why penguins are not able to live in the North is the habitat of the southern hemisphere, in which they are not accustomed to being close to predators and do not know how to defend themselves from them. Even relatively small arctic foxes and wolves can easily deprive a penguin of its egg clutch and chicks.
In the new place, the penguin faces serious competition for survival from local birds. Flightless penguins are unable to cope with gulls and terns just because some species of gulls have a wingspan of up to two meters.
However, the Yakut experiment with penguins may end happily.
There is a Pleistocene park in Yakutia – a reserve, a North-Eastern scientific station, located in the north-east of Yakutia, with an area of 144 square kilometers. It was founded in 1996 by Russian environmental scientist Sergey Zimov. An experiment is being conducted on the reserve territory to recreate the ecosystem of mammoth steppes that existed in the Northern Hemisphere during the Pleistocene, by restoring the population of herbivores that can live in the northern territories. This, according to scientists, can help stop warming. Yakut horses, moose, reindeer, musk oxen, bison, yaks, Kalmyk cows, sheep and steppe bison already live here. Why shouldn’t penguins join this worthy company?
Earlier, we talked about the closure of the first musk oxen farm in Taimyr. At the same time, the female musk ox Alana has successfully taken root in the Royev Rouchey park in Krasnoyarsk.
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Text: Denis Kozhevnikov, photo: Nikolay Shchipko
