The Center for Ecosystem Sentinels

05/22/2026

Congrats on attaining Wiley in research Jenny!

You can read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17490

04/25/2026

Happy ! It's such a privilege to be able to research and work with Magellanic and Galapagos penguins. Thank you to everyone who supports our work, whether it's through donations, likes, or spreading the word about our efforts to understand and protect this sentinel species.

As a thank you, we want you to feel the same joy and curiosity we feel in the field -- go to our World Penguin Day 2026 page (https://ecosystemsentinels.org/world-penguin-day-2026 ) to watch new student-made videos about our favorite bird, and keep on the lookout for some very special reels on Facebook and Instagram.

Yours in 🐧,
The Penguin Folks at the Center for Ecosystem Sentinels

04/25/2026

03/30/2026

Read all about Briana's keynote at the International Parliamentary Roundtable on Human-Wildlife Coexistence held in Botswana last January on UW News:

Briana Abrahms, associate professor of biology at the University of Washington, studies how climate change affects human-wildlife interactions and increases conflict around the world. In January, she...

03/06/2026

Congrats Leigh West for making the cover of newsletter Perspectives! Leigh will be defending her dissertation "Linking climate impacts on animal movement, community dynamics, and human-wildlife coexistence" on March 20.

Can you spot the publications written by Center members on the shelf? There's one that's coming out soon...

03/02/2026

Congrats Eric Wagner for making the cover of the PacificNW Magazine!! https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/the-seabirds-of-destruction-island-off-wa-reveal-impacts-of-climate-change/

From puffins to auklets, the feathered creatures of Destruction Island reveal the impacts of climate change. https://st.news/4l41MhK

02/28/2026

All week we’ve reviewed the candidates. One penguin stood out… mostly because it’s round. The winner of our first annual Fat Penguins Week is Tractor!!

Thank you to everyone who took part in our Fat Penguins Week. We hope you enjoy participating as much as we had fun preparing it 🐧 We’d also like to thank Anna Testorf, an undergraduate Biology major at UW, for coming up with this amazing idea and captured a lot of the media used during FPW 2026.

If you had fun following along be sure to follow us on our various platforms and subscribing to our quarterly newsletter. There's always something going on with the Center! https://ecosystemsentinels.org/subscribe-to-our-updates/

02/28/2026

Before we announce the winner, let's talk about the pre-molt trip. As stated in the previous post, adult Magellanic penguins are currently on the pre-molt foraging trips, trying to fatten up as much as possible before undergoing their catastrophic molt. Track 19 adult penguins as they forage on our website: https://ecosystemsentinels.org/live-penguin-tracking/

02/27/2026

The Fat Penguin Week Finals are upon us! Tractor and Shrek are now dueling it out to see who will be the winner of our first Fat Penguin Week. Voting has never been this adorable – go to ecosystemsentinels.org/fat-penguins-week and pick your penguin 🐧🗳️

Fact of the day: How do penguins prep for the molt? Magellanic penguins go on a pre-molt foraging trip, where they eat as many fish as they can. Right now, as juvenile and young adult penguins molt, adult penguins are on their pre-molt trip...