Jesse Rogerson: Spider Monkeys Know Things - January 27, 2026
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For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. As the planet warms, there are a lot of negative downstream consequences. See what I did there? Stream, because streams of water flowing off the glaciers. But nobody ever thinks about the penguins, the poor penguins. And the good news is the penguins might be adapting to warm weather. We're here with Jesse Rogerson. We're covering science news. Jesse is a professor at York University, an astrophysicist. I said that right. Jesse, welcome to the program.
Nailed it. Thank you.
How are penguins adapting to climate change?
Thanks for having me.
So the penguins, I worry about them. When I think of the ice caps melting, I think, what will the penguins do? I don't care about us. I don't care about the rest of the planet. I care about the penguins. but things might actually not be so bad for them.
Well, it depends on the species. So one thing to keep in mind here is that all climate change, climate change happens everywhere and it affects the entire earth, but it is accentuated, the effects of it in different ecosystems. And one of those is at the poles, both north and south. And in the Antarctic, the warming that's happening across the planet is about four times faster than the warming elsewhere on the planet, on average.
So it's, you know, it's accelerating.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's a problem. And so what these scientists, they're worried about the penguins too. So they went down, they set up a whole bunch, they had these all like 70 time-lapse cameras. So they were like, set up all these cameras near the breeding grounds of these various species of penguins, specifically the Adelie, the Chinstrap, and the Gentoo. And they were just monitoring, they started monitoring in 2012, and they were looking at where they set up their breeding grounds, when they do it, how long it lasts, the number of chicks, all that stuff, right? All the stuff that goes with breeding. And over this 10-year time span of tracking it, what they noticed is that as things got warmer, all three of the species they were tracking started doing their nesting and their breeding earlier and earlier and earlier, so much so that some of them were as much as 24 days earlier than normal in the spring.
Is that a bad thing? Well, it depends on your species. So there's, for example, the Gentoo's are actually kind of flourishing here. So the Gentoo penguins, they they're more able to set up breeding grounds in a variety of spaces. So they they're less worried about like having ice. or having open rock or whatever they can they could do it anywhere and they also eat a larger variety of food so when they shift earlier in the year they they can just adapt to what food is available they can adapt to what nesting grounds are available and they actually are flourishing but they're doing that at the expense of a couple of the other species that require the specific uh type of like the ice they they do their nesting on the ice they eat a specific kind of fish that is only available and with the gentoo's um sort of in invading that that niche that ecological niche it's now pushing out other penguin species so the short answer is is that some are doing good some are doing bad and the ones that are doing bad are the ones that have specific needs
Interesting. So mostly just disruption and potential biodiversity could decrease because if these one species thrive from climate change and push out the other ones, those ones will go extinct or have severe population depletion.
Exactly. The biggest problem with climate change in general is disruption, and we don't know the effects. You've heard of the food web. Nature is so interconnected, and it's such a delicate balance. And there's gives and takes all over the place, and nature is able to correct that. But when we enforce an outside variable of massive change of climate on a short timescale, that has effects that we cannot model. We just can't. Not to that detail. So we're stuck with following what's happening, seeing what's happening to these species, and the fallout from it could be a variety of things.
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