The effects of climate change are seemingly infinite. It feels like every day brings news of another dwindling population or wiped out plant species. When times get tough, watching videos of dawdling penguins can make the earth seem a little kinder. Unfortunately, penguins are not immune to climate change, and their population numbers and food supplies […]
Tag: chinstrap penguins
Fish-feed industry turns to krill, with unknown effects on the Antarctic ecosystem
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay/PUNTA ARENAS, Chile/PORDENONE, Italy — A mountain of krill meal has been packed inside a huge warehouse: divided into bags and stacked in hundreds of piles that stretch almost to the ceiling. The warehouse is near the port of Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, inside the main logistics center of Aker BioMarine, a Norwegian […]
Seeing 1,000 glorious fin whales back from near extinction is a rare glimmer of hope
Good news doesn’t get any more in-your-face than this. One thousand fin whales, one of the world’s biggest animals, were seen last week swimming in the same seas in which they were driven to near-extinction last century due to whaling. It’s like humans never happened. This vast assembly was spread over a five-mile-wide area between […]
What Will Happen to the Penguin Population as Climate Change Worsens?
The effects of climate change are seemingly infinite. It feels like every day brings news of another dwindling population or wiped out plant species. When times get tough, watching videos of dawdling penguins can make the earth seem a little kinder. Unfortunately, penguins are not immune to climate change, and their population numbers and food supplies […]
Alarm over collapse of chinstrap penguin numbers
Colonies of chinstrap penguins have fallen by more than half across islands in Antarctica, prompting scientific concern that “something is broken” in the world’s wildest ecosystem. After more than a month counting chicks in the South Shetland Islands, researchers suspect global heating is behind the sharp fall in numbers of the distinctive birds, which get […]
Antarctica’s Most Numerous Penguin Has Suffered Huge Declines, Expedition Finds
One month ago, I arrived with a team of scientists at Elephant Island, Antarctica—a lonesome, 29-mile-long hunk of glacier and granite off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The island was chronicled by a member of Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated 1916 expedition as “about as inhospitable as one could well imagine,” and it hasn’t changed much […]
Huge penguin colony at risk from erupting volcano
One of the world’s biggest colonies of penguins is at risk from a volcano that has erupted on their small sub-Antarctic island in a British overseas territory. British scientists fear that Mt Curry’s eruption could have a serious impact on the 1.2m chinstrap penguins and nearly 200,000 macaroni penguins based on Zavodovski, one of the […]