Global warming is on track to wipe out 70% of the world’s King penguins by century’s end, putting the regal birds on a path towards extinction, researchers warned.
As climate change drives away the fish and squid upon which the flightless creatures depend, the penguins must swim further afield to find sustenance for their hungry hatchlings on land.
“For most colonies, the length of the summer trips by parents to get food will soon become so long that their offspring could starve while waiting,” Celine Le Bohec, a population ecologist at the University of Strasbourg in France and co-author of a study in Nature Climate Change, explained.
King penguins are picky about where they settle: they need tolerable temperatures year round, no winter sea ice circling the island, and a smooth beach of sand or pebbles. Above all, they need an abundant, nearby source of food.
For thousands of years, that came from the Antarctic Polar Front, an upwelling from the Southern Ocean teeming with fish, squid and other comestibles. With climate change, however, this conveyor belt of nutrition has been drifting southward.
“King penguins were able to move around quite a lot to find the safest breeding ground,” senior author Emiliano Trucchi, an evolutionary geneticist at the Universities of Ferrara and Vienna in Italy, explained.
But this time, he added, man-made climate change is too abrupt and rapid.
To make matters worse, King penguins are dealing with competition from industrial fishing boats that scoop up fish by the tonne, and other species of penguins, such as Chinstrap, Gentoo and Adelie.
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Source: The Straits Times, 28 February 2018