Why did nearly a million king penguins vanish without a trace?
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/why-did-nearly-million-king-penguins-vanish-without-trace
Source: By Eli Kintisch, Science.
Excerpt: Where on Earth, wondered Henri Weimerskirch, were all the penguins? It was early 2017. Colleagues had sent the seabird ecologist aerial photos of Île aux Cochons, a barren volcanic island halfway between Madagascar and Antarctica that humans rarely visit. The images revealed vast areas of bare rock that, just a few decades before, had been crowded with some 500,000 pairs of nesting king penguins and their chicks. It appeared that the colony—the world’s largest king penguin aggregation and the second biggest colony of any of the 18 penguin species—had shrunk by 90%. ...he and his colleagues suspect that changes in the surrounding ocean forced the penguins to swim farther to find food. Studies of other king penguin colonies suggest foraging birds from Île aux Cochons normally swim toward an oceanic feature hundreds of kilometers to the south known as the polar front or Antarctic convergence. ...Evidence that a warming ocean could threaten the penguins comes from a 2015 study that Bost and his colleagues did at a smaller king penguin colony, on Possession Island, some 160 kilometers west of Île aux Cochons. ...a 2018 paper published in Nature Climate Change forecast that warming seas and other environmental changes could cut king penguin numbers by half by the end of the century....
Source: By Eli Kintisch, Science.
Excerpt: Where on Earth, wondered Henri Weimerskirch, were all the penguins? It was early 2017. Colleagues had sent the seabird ecologist aerial photos of Île aux Cochons, a barren volcanic island halfway between Madagascar and Antarctica that humans rarely visit. The images revealed vast areas of bare rock that, just a few decades before, had been crowded with some 500,000 pairs of nesting king penguins and their chicks. It appeared that the colony—the world’s largest king penguin aggregation and the second biggest colony of any of the 18 penguin species—had shrunk by 90%. ...he and his colleagues suspect that changes in the surrounding ocean forced the penguins to swim farther to find food. Studies of other king penguin colonies suggest foraging birds from Île aux Cochons normally swim toward an oceanic feature hundreds of kilometers to the south known as the polar front or Antarctic convergence. ...Evidence that a warming ocean could threaten the penguins comes from a 2015 study that Bost and his colleagues did at a smaller king penguin colony, on Possession Island, some 160 kilometers west of Île aux Cochons. ...a 2018 paper published in Nature Climate Change forecast that warming seas and other environmental changes could cut king penguin numbers by half by the end of the century....