The film March of the Penguins painted a grim picture for Antarctica’s Pointe Géologie emperor penguins facing climate: Although the route to their perennial nesting grounds was prone to change (because ice is prone to change), the location didn’t. Satellite imagery appeared to confirm the worst: Due to the warming of the Southern Ocean in the 1970s, the Pointe Géologie breeding population appeared to drop by half, seemingly because fewer chicks survived in the new environment. A new study from the University of Minnesota, however, says that’s not the case. The penguins aren’t dead, they just moved.

“Our research showing that colonies seem to appear and disappear throughout the years challenges behaviors we thought we understood about emperor penguins,” said Michelle LaRue, a research associate in the University’s Department of Earth Sciences. “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.”

As it turns out, before modern high-def satellite imagery, scientists just didn’t know all that much about Earth’s southern-most continent. Case in point, Pointe Géologie: Previously, scientists believed that it was extremely isolated, meaning the penguins living there were more or less stuck there. Now that researchers have  a better vie of the coastline, they found that’s not the case at all – plenty of areas for colonization are within travel distance for an emperor penguin.

For newer satellite cameras, penguins aren’t tough to track – they’re the only species living on the ice (which is white), and their guano stain (which is brown) makes following their travels pretty easy.

All told, the study found six instances in just three years in which emperor penguins did not return to the same location to breed, completely dispelling their previously assumed philopatric nature. They also report on one newly discovered colony on the Antarctic Peninsula that may represent the relocation of 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,” LaRue said. “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.”