A new study was conducted on penguins from the tropics to Antarctica and published in the July-August edition of the journal BioScience. According to the author, Dee Boersma from the University of Washington, penguins are sounding the alarm over catastrophic changes occurring throughout the oceans worldwide. Oil pollution, depletion of fisheries and increasing coastline development is threatening breeding grounds of many penguin species. What’s more , warming temperatures are causing population numbers to decline.
The situation is devastating for several species:
* Magellanic penguins along the Atlantic coast of Argentina have declined by ½ in 40 years
* African penguins have declined from 1.5 million pairs a century ago to 63,000 pairs by 2005
* Chinstrap and Adelie penguins along the Antarctic Peninsula have declined 50% since the mid-1970s
* Emperor penguins are having to raise their chicks more than 3 miles away from their habitual breeding grounds
* Galapagos penguins are suffering from climate change, as weather patterns affect the ocean currents and carry away the small fish that the penguins feed on
– from sciencepoles.org