Emperor penguins became famous with films like “March of the Penguins” and “Happy Feet”. What most people know about them is that they return to the same spot, year after year to nest and that they are endangered by climate change. New satellite imagery, however, shows that both of these things may be wrong.

The “March of the Penguins” colony is called Pointe Géologie. That colony has been studied and observed by researchers for more than six decades. There has been great concern about what would happen to the colony as the sea ice receded.

For five years, during the 1970s, researchers noticed a sharp decline in the population of the colony. It fell from 6,000 to 3,000 breeding pairs and it was assumed that warming oceans were causing that decline.

High-reslution satellite imagery, however, has shown that Pointe Géologie is not as isolated as was previously thought and that there are several other colonies within easy traveling distance for the penguins.

“It’s possible that birds have moved away from Pointe Géologie to these other spots and that means that maybe those banded birds didn’t die. If we want to accurately conserve the species, we really need to know the basics. We’ve just learned something unexpected, and we should rethink how we interpret colony fluctuations,” said Michelle LaRue, University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering researcher and lead author of the study, in a statement.

The researchers found six instances in three years in which emperor penguins chose a new breeding location. They also found a previously undocumented nesting location, which could represent a relocated position.

“Our research showing that colonies seem to appear and disappear throughout the years challenges behaviors we thought we understood about emperor penguins. If we assume that these birds come back to the same locations every year, without fail, these new colonies we see on satellite images wouldn’t make any sense. These birds didn’t just appear out of thin air—they had to have come from somewhere else. This suggests that emperor penguins move among colonies. That means we need to revisit how we interpret population changes and the causes of those changes,” ” said LaRue.

The new findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Ecography.