Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Gentoo penguins are notoriously difficult to study due to their remote habitats spread across the South Pacific.
• A new study, which aims to settle longstanding questions about the genus’ speciation, discovered that gentoo penguins actually comprises four species, including one that’s entirely new to science.
• Because gentoo penguins can be found on both the Antarctic continent and small islands, they are an interesting genus to study as sea levels rise and imperil penguins of all genuses across the Southern Hemisphere.

When it comes to penguins, Aptenodytes forsteri—otherwise known as the emperor penguin—gets all of the attention, but 17 other species are spread out across the Southern Hemisphere, each with its own personal flair. All seven members of the genus Eudyptes, for example, sport absolutely stunning bright-yellow crest feathers. The little penguin of Australia and New Zealand is, as its name suggests, the smallest penguin, standing only 12 inches tall, and the Galápagos penguin is the only species that can technically reside in the northern hemisphere. To make these creatures even stranger, penguins aren’t actually penguins.

Now, a new study published in the journal Communications Biology suggests that the official total number of penguin species should increase by three—and welcomes in an entirely new species. The additions arise from the genus Pygoscelis, otherwise known as gentoo penguins, which live on various islands across the South Pacific as well as Antarctica. Gentoo penguins have extremely remote habitats, some of which are thousands of miles from a permanently inhabited town, and they’re also generalized eaters, unlike other penguins, whose populations tend not to stray far from their breeding grounds. This makes keeping track of gentoo penguins, and their various species and subspecies, particularly difficult.

“There’s probably no species of penguin where the taxonomy has been more debated than the gentoo penguin,” University of California Berkeley’s Rauri Bowie, a co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “For over 100 years it’s been controversial as to how many species or how many subspecies there are.”

This study finally sets the record straight as Bowie, along with scientists from around the world, analyzed the genomes of 64 gentoo penguins from 10 different breeding colonies across the genus’ entire geographical range. They found that the speciation of gentoo penguins likely began some 300,000 to 500,000 years ago, kicked off by the Antarctic Polar Front, a temperature and salinity barrier that hinders animal movement. The genomic analysis revealed thousands of genetic variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs.

The team concluded that gentoo penguins weren’t a collection of four subspecies as previously believed, but were actually four distinct species, including a new species called Pygoscelis kerguelensis—a lineage that’s only found on Kerguelen Island and likely on nearby Heard Island.

“Whole genome sequencing has transformed our ability to not only look at adaptation from a perspective of how things diversify, but it has really important conservation value,” Bowie said in a press statement.

In their analysis, scientists found specific adaptations across different species that fit to their specific environment. In the south, for example, the southern gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis ellsworthi), which lives on the Antarctic peninsula and South Georgia island, has a larger number of genes related to fat and lipid storage as well as heat generation. Meanwhile, the northern gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) that resides in South America has more genes related to cardiac contraction and muscle excitation, likely to increase how long the penguin can remain hunting in the water.

Gentoo penguins offer a unique perspective on how climate change will impact penguin species more broadly, as their habitats stretch across Antarctica, which is offering an expanded range due to climate change, as well as small islands that are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels.

“In terms of climate change, island species that have really low population sizes could be compared with the sub-Antarctic gentoo penguins,” said Juliana Vianna, one of the paper’s senior authors and a professor of ecosystems and environment at Andrés Bello National University in Santiago, Chile. “Galapagos and other island penguin species, because they’re endemic to these islands, will find no place to go after a change in their environment.”

Today science added a number of new species to the world’s list of penguins. In the future, because of climate change, it may have to do the opposite.