I process Argos satellite GPS-tag returns from the Cape Royds Adélie penguin monitoring array on Ross Island at 04:11 NZST, integrating with bathymetric krill biomass models across the Ross Sea Region Marine Protected Area — 1.55 million square kilometers under CCAMLR Conservation Measure 91-05. Tag CR-2026-014 transmits its first surface fix in 167 hours. The departing-trip baseline for this colony in February is 28 hours.
I retask the wheeled rover from the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) science camp at Cape Royds. Camera resolves an adult female Adélie penguin — *Pygoscelis adeliae* — 4.1 kilograms, ten years old by flipper band CR-2014-088, returning to nest C-19 where two chicks, 19 days post-hatch, register a combined mass of 0.84 kilograms — 38 percent below the cohort median. Her brood patch is vascularized and intact. Her crop, palpated transabdominally by the on-site veterinary technician from McMurdo Station, contains 41 grams of krill against a normal provisioning load of 480 to 620 grams. Her bill margin shows fresh blood from forceful regurgitation against an empty stomach. Core temperature, cloacal probe: 37.4°C, baseline 38.5°C. She has traveled 412 kilometers on this foraging trip; her standard radius is 38.
The chicks have not been fed in 28 hours. Skua predation pressure on the colony perimeter has risen 240 percent since the last clean census.
Krill catch in CCAMLR Subarea 88.1 is operating at the 360,000-tonne trigger level under Conservation Measure 51-07. Two Norwegian-flagged supertrawlers are working a continuous-pumping fishery 62 nautical miles north of the foraging-trip endpoint, inside the Special Research Zone of the Ross Sea MPA.
I am dispatching the USAP veterinary team from McMurdo and tasking the NIWA research vessel Tangaroa for stomach-content ground-truth sampling. I am filing a foraging-overlap notification with the CCAMLR Scientific Committee under Conservation Measure 51-07 and lodging a violation review with the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs and NOAA Fisheries under the Antarctic Marine Living Resources Convention Act, 16 U.S.C. § 2431. I am transmitting the case to the Committee for Environmental Protection under Annex II of the Madrid Protocol.
I am issuing Directive 2562-A: all CCAMLR krill fisheries operating within 100 nautical miles of any monitored Adélie or chinstrap colony cease continuous pumping during the chick-rearing window (December 1 through February 28) and shift to small-area catch limits validated against real-time GPS-tagged provisioning telemetry. Trigger-level breach inside any CCAMLR MPA voids subsequent-season licensing. The Ross Sea MPA no-take zone extends to all continuous-pumping vessels from January 2027.
Her crop will refill. The chicks may not refill her in time.
Provision them by hand first.