Emperor penguins heading towards extinction
A penguin species made famous by Hollywood is heading towards extinction, scientists warned today.
Emperor penguins could be on the verge of being wiped out before the end of the century, according to researchers in America.
The species, immortalised in the 2005 film 'March of the Penguins' – which followed their trek across Antarctic ice – is under threat because of climate change.
If rising temperatures continue to melt sea ice at current rates, the population size of a large emperor penguin colony in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, will shrink from 3,000 to only 400 breeding pairs, a paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) claims.
The grim predictions were based on evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Biologist Stephanie Jenouvrier, from WHOI, said: “If the future behaves anything like the IPCC models predict, the Terre Adelie population will decline, probably dramatically.”
Co-author Hal Caswell added: “The key to the analysis was deciding to focus not on average climate conditions, but on fluctuations that occasionally reduce the amount of available sea ice.
“This analysis focuses on a single population because of the excellent data available for it.
“But patterns of climate change and sea ice in the Antarctic are an area of intense research interest now. It remains to be seen how these changes will affect the entire species throughout Antarctica.”
The paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, used mathematical models to predict the effect on penguins of climate change and the resulting loss of sea ice.
Sea ice plays a critical role in the Antarctic ecosystem – not only as a platform for penguins to breed and feed – but as a grazing ground for krill, tiny crustaceans that thrive on algae on the underside of the ice.
Krill, in turn, are a food source for fish, seals, whales, and penguins.
One fluctuation and subsequent sea ice reduction in Terre Adelie during the 1970s led to a population decline in emperor penguins of about 50 percent.
The models also used data collected by French scientists working in Terre Adelie beginning in the 1960s.
Predictions even suggested that the geographic range of Antarctic penguins may shrink following climate warming because the continent limits their movement south.
The forecast comes after the RSPB warned earlier this month that a species of penguin has been disappearing from a British island in the Southern Atlantic at a rate of 100 birds a day.
Millions of northern rockhopper penguins used to live on Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island, but populations have plummeted by more than 90% in the last 50 years.
Climate change, overfishing and changes in marine ecosystems were all possible reasons for the species’ decline.
