Antje Steinfurth

Antje Steinfurth is a conservation scientist and researcher at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which is based out of the United Kingdom. She graduated from Kiel University with a degree in biology, and a PhD in Marine Zoology. She has since worked on various projects researching penguins, and working toward their conservation.

Education

Steinfurth initially began her university studies at the University of Göttingen in Germany, pursuing a degree in biology. She later decided that she wanted to focus more on marine ecology, and transferred to Kiel University where she completed her Bachelor of Science degree in biology. While pursuing her degree, she studied Magellanic Penguins in Argentina. She graduated in 2007 with a PhD in Marine Zoology from Kiel University in Germany. While working on her doctorate, Steinfurth went to the Galápagos Islands where she studied the marine ecology and conservation of the Galápagos Penguins, an endangered, endemic species.

Career

After completing her PhD, Dr. Antje Steinfurth was a visiting scientist from November 2007 through July 2009 at the University of Bristol where she contributed to an international and interdisciplinary project on African Penguins.

Steinfurth then began working in a post-doctoral position at the University of Cape Town. While in this position she worked on many different seabird restoration projects. This is where she ended up joining the South African National Antarctic Programme and began working on the subantarctic islands. Steinfurth is most well known for her work researching the endangered Northern Rockhopper Penguins (Eudyptes moseleyi) in the South Atlantic Ocean and Southern Indian Ocean. Dr. Steinfurth participated as a researcher on Project Pinnamin, which started in April 2016 and ended in March 2018. Project Pinnamin had an overall goal of conserving Northern Rockhopper Penguins on Tristan da Cunha.

Since 2017, Steinfurth has been working with the RSPB on various projects monitoring the Northern Rockhopper Penguins. She was the Principal Investigator on the Gough Island Expedition in 2023. According to the research conducted on Gough Island, House Mice would consume over two million seabird eggs and chicks every year. The Gough Island Expedition went into motion with the goal of eradicating the invasive House Mice. The project wasn't entirely successful, yet the mouse population was reduced significantly. Further research is continuing to be done.

Steinfurth also participated in research with the goal of identifying possible genetic diversity between populations of Rockhopper Penguins on different islands in Tristan Da Cunha, as well as evidence of their migration between islands and ocean basins in the South Atlantic and South Indian Oceans. The team she worked with discovered that there is distinct genetic variability between populations in different oceanic basins, and little to no evidence of migration between basins. They also discovered that the level of migration between islands is just high enough to prevent genetic differences between islands.

Steinfurth now is a Conservation Scientist with the RSPB in the UK. She is currently based at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town, in South Africa. Her work centers around furthering our understanding of species distribution and population dynamics.

Her research still focuses on Tristan da Cunha, and she continues to lead the research on Gough Island. She is currently researching the spread of Avian Influenza across sub-antarctic islands. Her research involves Skuas as reservoirs and vectors for Bird Flu.

Selected works

• Booth, J.M., Steinfurth, A., Fusi, M. et al. Foraging plasticity of breeding Northern Rockhopper Penguins, Eudyptes moseleyi, in response to changing energy requirements. Polar Biol 41, 1815–1826 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-018-2321-6
• J.A. Vianna, F.A.N. Fernandes, M.J. Frugone, H.V. Figueiró, L.R. Pertierra, D. Noll, K. Bi, C.Y. Wang-Claypool, A. Lowther, P. Parker, C. Le Bohec, F. Bonadonna, B. Wienecke, P. Pistorius, A. Steinfurth, C.P. Burridge, G.P.M. Dantas, E. Poulin, W.B. Simison, J. Henderson, E. Eizirik, M.F. Nery, & R.C.K. Bowie, Genome-wide analyses reveal drivers of penguin diversification, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117 (36) 22303–22310, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006659117 (2020).
• Barrionuevo, M., Ciancio, J., Steinfurth, A. and Frere, E. (2020), Geolocation and stable isotopes indicate habitat segregation between sexes in Magellanic penguins during the winter dispersion. J Avian Biol, 51:. https://doi.org/10.1111/jav.02325
• Green, C.-P., Green, D. B., Ratcliffe, N., Thompson, D., Lea, M.-A., Baylis, A. M. M., Bond, A. L., Bost, C.-A., Crofts, S., Cuthbert, R. J., González-Solís, J., Morrison, K. W., Poisbleau, M., Pütz, K., Rey, A. R., Ryan, P. G., Sagar, P. M., Steinfurth, A., Thiebot, J.-B. ... Hindell, M. A. (2023). Potential for redistribution of post-moult habitat for Eudyptes penguins in the Southern Ocean under future climate conditions. Global Change Biology, 29, 648–667. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16500
• Wilson, R.P., Vargas, F.H., Steinfurth, A., Riordan, P., Ropert-Coudert, Y. and Macdonald, D.W. (2008), WHAT GROUNDS SOME BIRDS FOR LIFE? MOVEMENT AND DIVING IN THE [...] DIMORPHIC GALÁPAGOS CORMORANT. Ecological Monographs, 78: 633–652. https://doi.org/10.1890/07-0677.1