From: Reuters
Penguin populations have plummeted at a key breeding colony in Argentina, mirroring declines in many species of the marine flightless birds due to climate change, pollution and other factors, a study shows.Dee Boersma, a University of Washington professor who led the research, said the plight of the penguins is an indicator of big changes in the world’s oceans due to human activities.
“Penguins are in trouble,” Boersma, whose study appears in the journal BioScience, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “They certainly are canaries in the coal mine.”
For the past 25 years, Boersma has tracked the world’s largest breeding colony of Magellanic penguins located at Punta Tombo on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. She said that since 1987 she has observed a 22 percent decrease in the population of these penguins at the site.
Boersma said the decline appears to have begun in the early 1980s after the population at the site peaked probably at about 400,000 breeding pairs of Magellanic penguins between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Today’s total is half of that.
The world’s warming climate is only one of the causes of the penguins’ problems, she said. They also are threatened by oil pollution, depletion of fisheries, becoming entangled in fishing nets, and coastal development that eliminates breeding habitats, according to Boersma.
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