'Extremely Rare' Hybrid 'Rockaroni' Penguins Caught on Camera Evolving 'Before Our Eyes' (Exclusive)
The baby penguins are hybrids created by a rockhopper mom and a macaroni penguin dad
Penguin researchers Pablo "Popi" Borboroglu closely studied the "rockaroni" chicks and thinks the baby animals could have "evolutionary advantages" moving forward
Pablo "Popi" Borboroglu knew from an early age he was meant to be among the penguins.
"When I was a small boy, my grandmother used to tell me wonderful stories about her visits to see penguins along the wild Patagonian coast of Argentina, where I live and work today. Her stories sparked my early connection to nature," Borboroglu, a penguin researcher and conservationist with a Ph.D. in marine biology, tells PEOPLE.
This initial curiosity led Borboroglu to check out a penguin colony when he got a bit older.
"During my first visit to a penguin colony, I found myself surrounded by half a million penguins — and in that moment, I knew. I felt with complete clarity that my life's mission was to study and protect these incredible animals," the founder and president of the Global Penguin Society adds.
Borboroglu is now decades into his penguin research career, which is spotlighted in the new National Geographic docuseries Secrets of the Penguins. In the show, Borboroglu introduces viewers to a colony of southern rockhopper penguins living in Argentina. Among the birds are two innovative penguins who managed to do something scientists have recorded just a few times before.
Secrets of the Penguins captured on film a mixed-species penguin couple consisting of a female rockhopper and a male macaroni penguin. Stranger yet, the pair successfully mated and hatched the resulting eggs, welcoming several "rockaroni" hybrid chicks into the world.
"When two different species breed, the chances of the eggs hatching and chicks surviving are extremely low, so this finding is truly," Borboroglu says of the it-couple and their chicks featured in the Secrets of the Penguins final episode.
Observing the "rockaroni" family was a first for the penguin researcher and National Geographic Explorer.
Related: Cornered Mother Penguin Confronts Hungry Sea Lion '70 Times Her Size' in First of Its Kind Footage (Exclusive)
"It was absolutely fascinating. Observing a mixed-species pair successfully raising hybrid chicks in the wild was surprising and thought-provoking. Seeing these hybrids thrive offers an incredible opportunity to reflect on the adaptability of penguins and the complexity of their behavior," Borboroglu adds.
Secrets of the Penguins posits that the rockhopper mom and macaroni dad found love and had a family because they were "driven by environmental pressures that disrupt typical breeding patterns."
"As shown in Secrets of the Penguins and supported by research, one key factor may be limited mate availability. In colonies where one species is scarce, individuals may form mixed-species pairs out of necessity," Borboroglu says. "Another intriguing possibility is that the more pronounced physical features of macaroni penguins — such as their larger body size, brighter crests, and louder vocalizations — might be interpreted by rockhoppers as signals of stronger body condition or higher fitness."
Borboroglu suggests we are "witnessing evolution before our eyes." If environmental factors force enough rockhoppers and macaroni penguins together, then this "hybridization might act as a pathway to speciation."
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"It was a vivid reminder that nature is constantly trying new experiments — and sometimes, those experiments succeed in the most unexpected ways," he says.
Of course, a new species emerging from "rockaroni" unions is far down the line and will be challenged by the unique obstacles "rockaroni" chicks face.
"Hybridization between macaroni and rockhopper penguins is extremely rare because of their differing breeding behaviors and habitats. When it does occur, the physical differences between the species pose added difficulties — hybrid chicks are larger and need more food, which puts extra strain on the smaller rockhopper parent during chick-rearing," he explains.
But it's not all rough road for "rockaroni" families. The penguin researcher notes that the chicks could have "evolutionary advantages" in the future.
"The survival and breeding success of 'rockaroni' penguins suggest an exceptional level of adaptability. Hybridization may be nature's response to environmental pressures, creating new genetic combinations that help wildlife cope with shifting conditions."
Borboroglu hopes that meeting the penguin family during Secrets of the Penguins inspires animal lovers to protect the birds. According to the expert, half of the world's 18 penguin species are listed as threatened or worse on the IUCN Red List. All penguins face threats created by climate change, overfishing, pollution, and habitat degradation.
"I hope people come away with a deeper sense of empathy and admiration for penguins and all marine species. I want them to see how extraordinary these animals are and how fragile their lives can be. Being a penguin in today's world is incredibly difficult. They are tough, resilient, determined, and brave — but even so, they can't face the mounting challenges alone," Borboroglu shares.
Related: Wildlife Expert Shares the 'Ridiculous' Animal Encounter He Caught on Film for the First Time (Exclusive)
The conservationist is also personally dedicated to penguins since the birds have added so much to his life.
"Thanks to penguins, I met my wife on a remote island in Patagonia, and they've been part of our journey ever since. They also allowed me to show my sons that it's possible to follow your dreams — and fulfill your life's mission — even against all odds," he says.
Borboroglu adds, "During my 36 years of working with penguins, I've always shared the same message: if these birds go to such incredible lengths to survive and raise their chicks successfully — overcoming immense challenges and threats every day — then how can we not do something, even a small act, to help lighten their load?"
Animal lovers can learn more about penguins and how to help them by visiting the Global Penguin Society's website and tuning into National Geographic's Secrets of the Penguins, now available to stream on Hulu and Disney+.
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National Geographic
17 hours ago
- National Geographic
The first Europeans weren't who you might think
Genetic tests of ancient settlers' remains show that Europe is a melting pot of bloodlines from Africa, the Middle East, and today's Russia. Three waves of immigrants settled prehistoric Europe. The last, some 5,000 years ago, were the Yamnaya, horse-riding cattle herders from Russia who built imposing grave mounds like this one near Žabalj, Serbia. DANUBIAN ROUTE OF YAMNAYA CULTURE PROJECT, NATIONAL SCIENCE CENTER, POLAND Photographs by Rémi Bénali This story appears in the August 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine. The idea that there were once 'pure' populations of ancestral Europeans, there since the days of woolly mammoths, has inspired ideologues since well before the Nazis. It has long nourished white racism, and in recent years it has stoked fears about the impact of immigrants: fears that have threatened to rip apart the European Union and roiled politics in the United States. Now scientists are delivering new answers to the question of who Europeans really are and where they came from. Their findings suggest that the continent has been a melting pot since the Ice Age. Europeans living today, in whatever country, are a varying mix of ancient bloodlines hailing from Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe. (Modern Europe's Genetic History Starts in Stone Age) The evidence comes from archaeological artifacts, from the analysis of ancient teeth and bones, and from linguistics. But above all it comes from the new field of paleogenetics. During the past decade it has become possible to sequence the entire genome of humans who lived tens of millennia ago. Technical advances in just the past few years have made it cheap and efficient to do so; a well-preserved bit of skeleton can now be sequenced for around $500. The result has been an explosion of new information that is transforming archaeology. In 2018 alone, the genomes of more than a thousand prehistoric humans were determined, mostly from bones dug up years ago and preserved in museums and archaeological labs. In the process any notion of European genetic purity has been swept away on a tide of powdered bone. Analysis of ancient genomes provides the equivalent of the personal DNA testing kits available today, but for people who died long before humans invented writing, the wheel, or pottery. The genetic information is startlingly complete: Everything from hair and eye color to the inability to digest milk can be determined from a thousandth of an ounce of bone or tooth. And like personal DNA tests, the results reveal clues to the identities and origins of ancient humans' ancestors—and thus to ancient migrations. The horsemanship the Yamnaya brought to Europe lives on in their native region. A rider at the Zaporizhzhya Cossack Museum on Ukraine's Khortytsya Island demonstrates the acrobatic skills that made the Cossacks such feared warriors from the 1400s on. Three major movements of people, it now seems clear, shaped the course of European prehistory. Immigrants brought art and music, farming and cities, domesticated horses and the wheel. They introduced the Indo-European languages spoken across much of the continent today. They may have even brought the plague. The last major contributors to western and central Europe's genetic makeup—the last of the first Europeans, so to speak—arrived from the Russian steppe as Stonehenge was being built, nearly 5,000 years ago. They finished the job. In an era of debate over migration and borders, the science shows that Europe is a continent of immigrants and always has been. 'The people who live in a place today are not the descendants of people who lived there long ago,' says Harvard University paleogeneticist David Reich. 'There are no indigenous people—anyone who hearkens back to racial purity is confronted with the meaninglessness of the concept.' Yamnaya artifacts from their homeland in Russia and Ukraine include a four-foot-tall anthropomorphic stela from 3000 B.C. featuring axes and horses. YAVORNITSKY NATIONAL HISTORICAL MUSEUM, DNIPROPETROVSK, UKRAINE Thirty-two years ago the study of the DNA of living humans helped establish that we all share a family tree and a primordial migration story: All people outside Africa are descended from ancestors who left that continent more than 60,000 years ago. About 45,000 years ago, those first modern humans ventured into Europe, having made their way up through the Middle East. Their own DNA suggests they had dark skin and perhaps light eyes. Europe then was a forbidding place. Mile-thick ice sheets covered parts of the continent. Where there was enough warmth, there was wildlife. There were also other humans, but not like us: Neanderthals, whose own ancestors had wandered out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years earlier, had already adapted to the cold and harsh conditions. The first modern Europeans lived as hunters and gatherers in small, nomadic bands. They followed the rivers, edging along the Danube from its mouth on the Black Sea deep into western and central Europe. For millennia, they made little impact. Their DNA indicates they mixed with the Neanderthals—who, within 5,000 years, were gone. Today about 2 percent of a typical European's genome consists of Neanderthal DNA. A typical African has none. As Europe was gripped by the Ice Age, the modern humans hung on in the ice-free south, adapting to the cold climate. Around 27,000 years ago, there may have been as few as a thousand of them, according to some population estimates. They subsisted on large mammals such as mammoths, horses, reindeer, and aurochs—the ancestors of modern cattle. In the caves where they sheltered, they left behind spectacular paintings and engravings of their prey. DNA recovered from ancient teeth and bones lets researchers understand population shifts over time. As the cost of sequencing DNA has plummeted, scientists at labs like this one in Jena, Germany, have been able to unravel patterns of past human migration. MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY About 14,500 years ago, as Europe began to warm, humans followed the retreating glaciers north. In the ensuing millennia, they developed more sophisticated stone tools and settled in small villages. Archaeologists call this period the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. In the 1960s Serbian archaeologists uncovered a Mesolithic fishing village nestled in steep cliffs on a bend of the Danube, near one of the river's narrowest points. Called Lepenski Vir, the site was an elaborate settlement that had housed as many as a hundred people, starting roughly 9,000 years ago. Some dwellings were furnished with carved sculptures that were half human, half fish. Bones found at Lepenski Vir indicated that the people there depended heavily on fish from the river. Today what remains of the village is preserved under a canopy overlooking the Danube; sculptures of goggle-eyed river gods still watch over ancient hearths. 'Seventy percent of their diet was fish,' says Vladimir Nojkovic, the site's director. 'They lived here almost 2,000 years, until farmers pushed them out.' In Sweden, ancient rock carvings (enhanced with modern red paint) echo cultural shifts brought by migrants—starting with hunter-gatherers who came from Africa in the Ice Age and followed retreating glaciers north. Their DNA is still prevalent, especially in southern Baltic countries. Over millennia, migrating humans have used the Danube River, seen here at a narrow gorge between Serbia and Romania, as a highway from the Fertile Crescent into the heart of Europe. The site of Lepenski Vir, nearby in Serbia, was a haven for fishing hunter-gatherers—until farmers took over around 6000 B.C. The Konya Plain in central Anatolia is modern Turkey's breadbasket, a fertile expanse where you can see rainstorms blotting out mountains on the horizon long before they begin spattering the dust around you. It has been home to farmers, says University of Liverpool archaeologist Douglas Baird, since the first days of farming. For more than a decade Baird has been excavating a prehistoric village here called Boncuklu. It's a place where people began planting small plots of emmer and einkorn, two ancient forms of wheat, and probably herding small flocks of sheep and goats, some 10,300 years ago, near the dawn of the Neolithic period. Within a thousand years the Neolithic revolution, as it's called, spread north through Anatolia and into southeastern Europe. By about 6,000 years ago, there were farmers and herders all across Europe. It has long been clear that Europe acquired the practice of farming from Turkey or the Levant, but did it acquire farmers from the same places? The answer isn't obvious. For decades, many archaeologists thought a whole suite of innovations—farming, but also ceramic pottery, polished stone axes capable of clearing forests, and complicated settlements—was carried into Europe not by migrants but by trade and word of mouth, from one valley to the next, as hunter-gatherers who already lived there adopted the new tools and way of life. But DNA evidence from Boncuklu has helped show that migration had a lot more to do with it. The farmers of Boncuklu kept their dead close, burying them in the fetal position under the floors of their houses. Beginning in 2014, Baird sent samples of DNA extracted from skull fragments and teeth from more than a dozen burials to DNA labs in Sweden, Turkey, the U.K., and Germany. Many of the samples were too badly degraded after spending millennia in the heat of the Konya Plain to yield much DNA. But then Johannes Krause and his team at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History tested the samples from a handful of petrous bones. The petrous bone is a tiny part of the inner ear, not much bigger than a pinkie tip; it's also about the densest bone in the body. Researchers have found that it preserves genetic information long after usable DNA has been baked out of the rest of a skeleton. That realization, along with better sequencing machines, has helped drive the explosion in ancient DNA studies. Excavations at the 10,300-year-old site of Boncuklu in Turkey have revealed that people were living there during the transition to farming. The person buried here under the floor of a home likely would have farmed small plots of domesticated wheat, and may have herded goats and sheep, while continuing to forage. The Boncuklu petrous bones paid off: DNA extracted from them was a match for farmers who lived and died centuries later and hundreds of miles to the northwest. That meant early Anatolian farmers had migrated, spreading their genes as well as their lifestyle. They didn't stop in southeastern Europe. Over the centuries their descendants pushed along the Danube past Lepenski Vir and deep into the heart of the continent. Others traveled along the Mediterranean by boat, colonizing islands such as Sardinia and Sicily and settling southern Europe as far as Portugal. From Boncuklu to Britain, the Anatolian genetic signature is found wherever farming first appears. Those Neolithic farmers mostly had light skin and dark eyes—the opposite of many of the hunter-gatherers with whom they now lived side by side. 'They looked different, spoke different languages … had different diets,' says Hartwick College archaeologist David Anthony. 'For the most part, they stayed separate.' A woman harvests wheat by hand near Konya, Turkey. Farmers from Anatolia brought agriculture to Europe starting nearly 9,000 years ago. Within a few millennia, farmers and herders dominated most of the continent. Across Europe, this creeping first contact was standoffish, sometimes for centuries. There's little evidence of one group taking up the tools or traditions of the other. Even where the two populations did mingle, intermarriage was rare. 'There's no question they were in contact with each other, but they weren't exchanging wives or husbands,' Anthony says. 'Defying every anthropology course, people were not having sex with each other.' Fear of the other has a long history. About 5,400 years ago, everything changed. All across Europe, thriving Neolithic settlements shrank or disappeared altogether. The dramatic decline has puzzled archaeologists for decades. 'There's less stuff, less material, less people, less sites,' Krause says. 'Without some major event, it's hard to explain.' But there's no sign of mass conflict or war. After a 500-year gap, the population seemed to grow again, but something was very different. In southeastern Europe, the villages and egalitarian cemeteries of the Neolithic were replaced by imposing grave mounds covering lone adult men. Farther north, from Russia to the Rhine, a new culture sprang up, called Corded Ware after its pottery, which was decorated by pressing string into wet clay. The State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, has dozens of Corded Ware graves, including many that were hastily rescued by archaeologists before construction crews went to work. To save time and preserve delicate remains, the graves were removed from the ground in wooden crates, soil and all, and stored in a warehouse for later analysis. Stacked to the ceiling on steel shelves, they're now a rich resource for geneticists. Bones and artifacts some 7,700 years old found at Aktopraklik, a Neolithic village in northwestern Turkey, offer clues to the early days of agriculture. DNA extracted from the skulls of people buried here has helped researchers trace the spread of early farmers into Europe. BURSA CITY MUSEUM, TURKEY Corded Ware burials are so recognizable, archaeologists rarely need to bother with radiocarbon dating. Almost invariably, men were buried lying on their right side and women lying on their left, both with their legs curled up and their faces pointed south. In some of the Halle warehouse's graves, women clutch purses and bags hung with canine teeth from dozens of dogs; men have stone battle-axes. In one grave, neatly contained in a wooden crate on the concrete floor of the warehouse, a woman and child are buried together. When researchers first analyzed the DNA from some of these graves, they expected the Corded Ware folk would be closely related to Neolithic farmers. Instead, their DNA contained distinctive genes that were new to Europe at the time—but are detectable now in just about every modern European population. Many Corded Ware people turned out to be more closely related to Native Americans than to Neolithic European farmers. That deepened the mystery of who they were. Masked figures at the annual carnival in Ottana, a village on the Italian island of Sardinia, act out human mastery over animals, a theme dating to the early days of domestication. DNA of Europe's first farmers still dominates the genes of modern Sardinians. One bright October morning near the Serbian town of Žabalj, Polish archaeologist Piotr Włodarczak and his colleagues steer their pickup toward a mound erected 4,700 years ago. On the plains flanking the Danube, mounds like this one, a hundred feet across and 10 feet high, provide the only topography. It would have taken weeks or months for prehistoric humans to build each one. It took Włodarczak's team weeks of digging with a backhoe and shovels to remove the top of the mound. Standing on it now, he peels back a tarp to reveal what's underneath: a rectangular chamber containing the skeleton of a chieftain, lying on his back with his knees bent. Impressions from the reed mats and wood beams that formed the roof of his tomb are still clear in the dark, hard-packed earth. 'It's a change of burial customs around 2800 B.C.,' Włodarczak says, crouching over the skeleton. 'People erected mounds on a massive scale, accenting the individuality of people, accenting the role of men, accenting weapons. That's something new in Europe.' It was not new 800 miles to the east, however. On what are now the steppes of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine, a group of nomads called the Yamnaya, some of the first people in the world to ride horses, had mastered the wheel and were building wagons and following herds of cattle across the grasslands. They built few permanent settlements. But they buried their most prominent men with bronze and silver ornaments in mighty grave mounds that still dot the steppes. By 2800 B.C, archaeological excavations show, the Yamnaya had begun moving west, probably looking for greener pastures. Włodarczak's mound near Žabalj is the westernmost Yamnaya grave found so far. But genetic evidence, Reich and others say, shows that many Corded Ware people were, to a large extent, their descendants. Like those Corded Ware skeletons, the Yamnaya shared distant kinship with Native Americans—whose ancestors hailed from farther east, in Siberia. Within a few centuries, other people with a significant amount of Yamnaya DNA had spread as far as the British Isles. In Britain and some other places, hardly any of the farmers who already lived in Europe survived the onslaught from the east. In what is now Germany, 'there's a 70 percent to possibly 100 percent replacement of the local population,' Reich says. 'Something very dramatic happens 4,500 years ago.' Until then, farmers had been thriving in Europe for millennia. They had settled from Bulgaria all the way to Ireland, often in complex villages that housed hundreds or even thousands of people. Volker Heyd, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, Finland, estimates there were as many as seven million people in Europe in 3000 B.C. In Britain, Neolithic people were constructing Stonehenge. To many archaeologists, the idea that a bunch of nomads could replace such an established civilization within a few centuries has seemed implausible. 'How the hell would these pastoral, decentralized groups overthrow grounded Neolithic society, even if they had horses and were good warriors?' asks Kristian Kristiansen, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. A clue comes from the teeth of 101 people living on the steppes and farther west in Europe around the time that the Yamnaya's westward migration began. In seven of the samples, alongside the human DNA, geneticists found the DNA of an early form of Yersinia pestis—the plague microbe that killed roughly half of all Europeans in the 14th century. Unlike that flea-borne Black Death, this early variant had to be passed from person to person. The steppe nomads apparently had lived with the disease for centuries, perhaps building up immunity or resistance—much as the Europeans who colonized the Americas carried smallpox without succumbing to it wholesale. And just as smallpox and other diseases ravaged Native American populations, the plague, once introduced by the first Yamnaya, might have spread rapidly through crowded Neolithic villages. That could explain both their surprising collapse and the rapid spread of Yamnaya DNA from Russia to Britain. 'Plague epidemics cleared the way for the Yamnaya expansion,' says Morten Allentoft, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who helped identify the ancient plague DNA. But that theory has a major question: Evidence of plague has only just recently been documented in ancient Neolithic skeletons, and so far, no one has found anything like the plague pits full of diseased skeletons left behind after the Black Death. If a plague wiped out Europe's Neolithic farmers, it left little trace. Whether or not they brought plague, the Yamnaya did bring domesticated horses and a mobile lifestyle based on wagons into Stone Age Europe. And in bringing innovative metal weapons and tools, they may have helped nudge Europe toward the Bronze Age. When construction of Stonehenge began about 3000 B.C., Britain was inhabited by Neolithic farmers. A millennium later, when it was finished, the Neolithic population had been replaced by descendants of the Yamnaya—perhaps because the latter carried plague. That might not have been the Yamnaya's most significant contribution to Europe's development. Their arrival on the continent matches the time linguists pinpoint as the initial spread of Indo-European languages, a family of hundreds that includes most languages spoken from Ireland to Russia to the northern half of India. All are thought to have evolved from a single proto-Indo-European tongue, and the question of where it was spoken and by whom has been debated since the 19th century. According to one theory, it was the Neolithic farmers from Anatolia who brought it into Europe along with farming. Another theory, proposed a century ago by a German scholar named Gustaf Kossinna, held that the proto-Indo-Europeans were an ancient race of north Germans—the people who made Corded Ware pots and axes. Kossinna thought that the ethnicity of people in the past—their biological identity, in effect—could be deduced from the stuff they left behind. 'Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas,' he wrote, 'correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes.' The north German tribe of proto-Indo-Europeans, Kossinna argued, had moved outward and dominated an area that stretched most of the way to Moscow. Nazi propagandists later used that as an intellectual justification for the modern Aryan 'master race' to invade eastern Europe. Partly as a result, for decades after World War II the whole idea that ancient cultural shifts might be explained by migrations fell into ill repute in some archaeological circles. Even today it makes some archaeologists uncomfortable when geneticists draw bold arrows across maps of Europe. 'This kind of simplicity leads back to Kossinna,' says Heyd, who's German. 'It calls back old demons of blond, blue-eyed guys coming back somehow out of the hell where they were sent after World War II.' Yet ancient DNA, which provides direct information about the biology of ancient humans, has become a strong argument against Kossinna's theory. First, in documenting the spread of the Yamnaya and their descendants deeper and deeper into Europe at just the right time, the DNA evidence supports the favored theory among linguists: that proto-Indo-Europeans migrated into Europe from the Russian steppe, not the other way around. Second, together with archaeology it amounts to a rejection of Kossinna's claim that some kind of pure race exists in Europe, one that can be identified from its cultural artifacts. All Europeans today are a mix. The genetic recipe for a typical European would be roughly equal parts Yamnaya and Anatolian farmer, with a much smaller dollop of African hunter-gatherer. But the average conceals large regional variations: more 'eastern cowboy' genes in Scandinavia, more farmer ones in Spain and Italy, and significant chunks of hunter-gatherer DNA in the Baltics and eastern Europe. 'To me, the new results from DNA are undermining the nationalist paradigm that we have always lived here and not mixed with other people,' Gothenburg's Kristiansen says. 'There's no such thing as a Dane or a Swede or a German.' Instead, 'we're all Russians, all Africans.' From his base in Berlin, Andrew Curry writes about archaeology and other subjects. Rémi Bénali lives near Arles, France, where he photographed a Roman boat for the April 2014 issue.
National Geographic
2 days ago
- National Geographic
A century ago, there was a race to make the first color photos. Now there's a race to save them.
The revolutionary invention of autochromes changed photography. As those pictures decay, they're revealing a new kind of beauty. First digitized in 2008 (left), this 1937 photo of a dance performance in Mississippi was created using Dufaycolor, an early color-film product. By 2023, it had been transformed by a form of chemical deterioration known as vinegar syndrome. Photograph by J. Baylor Roberts, National Geographic Image Collection In the early 1980s, the late National Geographic Society photographer turned archivist Volkmar Wentzel was delving through storage when he stumbled onto something both breathtaking and heartbreaking: a box of delicate glass panels, most of them the size of postcards, displaying color images captured in the early 20th century. Many were deteriorating, their once crisp scenes speckled with ghostly snowflakes, obscured by halos, and otherwise rendered surreal by time and neglect. They were autochromes, the products of a turn-of-the-20th-century race to capture the world in all its color. And now the race was on to preserve them, even as time transformed them in extraordinary ways. Introduced in 1907 by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière, autochrome technology was revolutionary in its day, relying on a light-sensitive silver emulsion covered with a fine layer of potato starch. That powdery extract—then popular as thickener, adhesive, and fabric stiffener—was crucial to capturing the chroma of the era. Microscopic particles dyed green, orange, and violet were scattered across a plate and sealed on with varnish. When light struck the plate through a camera's open shutter, each colored granule blocked a range of wavelengths corresponding to colors of the visible spectrum, exposing the emulsion beneath to countless tiny dots of variously filtered light. Some autochromes—early 20th-century color photos on glass plates—now have freckles from oxidizing silver particles, as in this undated, unidentified landscape. Unknown Photographer, National Geographic Image Collection After a few chemical baths in a darkroom, the transparency that appeared on glass was, seen up close, a pointillistic mosaic. But pull back and shine light through the plate—covered with another glass layer, for protection—and a vivid, painterly image emerged. National Geographic magazine's first full-time editor was an autochrome champion, commissioning and procuring glass plate works from photographers around the world. Because exposure times were long, much of early color photography consists of still lifes and landscapes, but National Geographic acquired dynamic images of life as it's lived: of crowded bazaars in Albania, of masked dancers in Tibet, of riders atop brightly garbed elephants in India. Autochromes, together with similar processes involving glass plates, remained the primary means of making color photos until the 1935 debut of Kodachrome film, with its layers of emulsion that were themselves photosensitive. In the film era, the Society's glass plates were not carefully preserved. Wentzel, during more than 40 years as a National Geographic field photographer, saw value in the old photos while many of his peers were focused on innovation. When the Society thinned its collection in the 1960s, he rescued plates from the trash, taking them home for safekeeping and eventual return to the archive. Others simply moldered, forgotten, until Wentzel rediscovered them in off-site storage upon becoming the Society's first official photo archivist, in 1980. A Syrian desert patrol on camelback visits the ruins of Palmyra in a 1938 Dufaycolor. This version was scanned in 2012, before its acetate film began visibly degrading. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection In the past 13 years, the telltale blotch of vinegar syndrome has set in. 'Dufays' and autochromes are kept in cold storage today, which slows but doesn't halt such deterioration. Photograph by W. Robert Moore, National Geographic Image Collection Wentzel made it a mission to preserve, catalog, and exhibit the old photos, and today National Geographic's Early Color Photography Collection comprises some 13,000 plates, including one of the world's largest assemblages of autochromes (the largest is at the Musée Albert-Kahn, outside Paris). But as with many remaining early color photos, National Geographic's have been altered by light, heat, humidity, and improper handling. Plates have cracked and fissured. Oxidizing silver particles have created radiant, amoeba-shaped orange blotches. On the autochrome descendants known as Dufaycolors, violet bruises are evidence of 'vinegar syndrome,' a chemical decay affecting layers of film between glass. Named for its telltale scent and contagious from plate to plate, vinegar syndrome is 'a plague amongst photographic archives,' says Sara Manco, director of the National Geographic Society's photo and illustration archives. Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project. Rebecca Dupont , National Geographic image archivist It all sounds rather tragic, but the blemishes also have given many of the plates a strange new beauty. No longer pristine documents of history, they've become testaments to the ravages of time: abstracted, fragmented, and obscured, like so many ancient and admired artifacts. What's more, says image archivist Rebecca Dupont, witnessing the deterioration—a process that will only ever play out once—offers lessons about the science behind these objects. 'If you think about it, photography is still a relatively new medium, only 150 years old,' Dupont says. And the objects in the collection 'haven't yet reached the end of their lives. They're in a special stage right now where we get to see what happens to them.' (These 18 autochrome photos will transport you to another era.) Exposure to humidity caused this Dufaycolor to fade and its film base to shrivel. As National Geographic archivist Sara Manco says, 'We'll never know what that image was like.' Photograph by Rudolf Balogh, National Geographic Image Collection Even as the plates continue to deteriorate, some measure of permanence has been achieved. With a 2020 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Manco and a team of archivists spent three years digitizing the entire collection. These days, the originals are carefully organized in temperature-controlled storage. Those afflicted with vinegar syndrome are sequestered, and many broken ones have been painstakingly pieced together. Despite all that care, the archivists know they can't preserve the plates forever—and they're OK with that. 'Degrading always sounds bad, but they're also developing, from documentary objects into a weird science-history project,' Dupont says. 'Are the images we're looking at being lost? Or are they just being changed into something new?' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
National Geographic
4 days ago
- National Geographic
National Geographic Masthead
Nathan Lump, SVP & Editor in Chief, National Geographic Geoffrey Gagnon, VP, Executive Editor Paul Martinez, VP, Creative Director Alex Pollack, Director of Photography Sadie Quarrier, Editorial Director for Integrated Storytelling Alissa Swango, VP, Head of Digital & Video Oussama Zahr, Director of Editorial Operations Features Ben Paynter, Editorial Features Director Amy Briggs, Senior Editorial Manager, History Alexa McMahon, Senior Editorial Manager, Features & Special Projects Matt Skenazy, Senior Editorial Manager, Features Brian Kevin, Editorial Manager, Features Eve Conant, Jennifer Leman, Nick Martin, Rose Minutaglio, Senior Editors Alicia Russo, Creative Producer, Integrated Storytelling Digital Editorial Katie Baker, Digital Editorial Director Amy McKeever, Senior Digital Editorial Manager Brian Resnick, Digital Editorial Manager Stassa Edwards, Senior Digital Editor, Features Sarah Gibbens, Senior Digital Editor, Science & Environment Hannah Cheney, Kwin Mosby, Senior Digital Editors, Travel Anne Kim-Dannibale, Senior Digital Editor, Special Projects Helen Thompson, Senior Digital Editor, Science Yasmine Maggio, Nicholas St. Fleur, Starlight Williams, Digital Editors Domonique Tolliver, Digital SEO Editor Janey Adams, Director of Digital Engagement Francis Rivera, Manager, Digital Engagement Setota Hailemariam, Emily Martin, Digital Producers Jennifer Murphy, Senior Video Manager Cosima Amelang, Video Manager Rebekah Barlas, Zach Baumgartner, Halley Brown, Tiffany D'Emidio, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez, Veda Shastri, Senior Video Producers Nick Garbaty, Video Producer William O'Connor, Manager, Editorial Newsletters Photography Breann Birkenbuel, Photography Manager, Research & Operations Samantha Clark, Photography Manager, Digital & Short Form Anne Farrar, Alexa Keefe, James Wellford, Photography Managers Julie Hau, Allyson Torrisi, Senior Photo Editors Rebecca Fudala, Crystal Henry, Allison Hess, Ian Morton, Cameron Peters, Photo Editors Elena Sheveiko, Assistant Photo Specialist Claire Caple, Madison Tessler, Photo Coordinators Mark Thiessen, Manager of Photo Engineering & Studio Tom O'Brien, Senior Photo Engineer Rebecca Hale, Staff Photographer Eric Flynn, Assistant Photo Engineer Special Interest Titles Bridget E. Hamilton, Editorial Director of Special Interest Titles Cheryl Grant-Albano, Senior Editorial Manager, Special Interest Titles Kay Boatner, Allyson Shaw, Senior Editors, Kids & Family Alexandra Hartnett, Senior Production Editor, Special Interest Titles Natalie Konopinski, Senior Editor, Newsstand Special Issues Tiara Beatty, Editor, History Magazine Creative Andrea Nasca, Director of Design Linda Makarov, Hannah Tak, Managing Designers Brandon Ferrill, Senior Designer Megan McCrink, Sandi Owatverot-Nuzzo, Designers Madison Tran, Assistant Designer John Tomanio, Director of Graphics Fernando Gomez Baptista, Alberto Lucas López, Senior Artists Diana Marques, Graphics Production Manager Monica Serrano, Jason Treat, Senior Graphics Editors Lucas Petrin, Elizabeth Sisk, Associate Graphics Editors Matt Chwastyk, Senior Cartography Manager Rosemary Wardley, Digital Cartography Manager Christine Fellenz, Senior Cartography Editor Scott Zillmer, Senior Cartographic Quality Control Editor Soren Walljasper, Cartography Editor Patricia Healy, Map & Graphic Research Editor Claire Manibog, Director of Interactive Storytelling Ryan Morris, Senior Interactive Storytelling Editor Eduardo Vélez, Senior Developer, Interactive Storytelling Courtney Beesch, Projects Editor, Interactive Storytelling JoElla Carman, Visual Editor, Interactive Storytelling Ben Scott, Graphics Editor, Interactive Storytelling Michael G. Lappin, Production Manager John Chow, Imaging Manager Rebekah A. Cain, Manufacturing Manager Rahsaan J. Jackson, Wendy K. Smith, Imaging Specialists Editorial Operations Amy Kolczak, Senior Editorial Manager of Copy & International Cindy Leitner, Senior Copy Editor Caroline Braun, Emily Shenk Flory, Jennifer Vilaga, Copy Editors Sylvia Espinoza, Senior Editorial Manager of Research Michael Fry, Robin A. Palmer, Taryn L. Salinas, Heidi Schultz, Research Editors Leigh Mitnick, International Editions Editor Ariana Pettis, Production Editor Elena Giardina, Editorial Coordinator
