Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 1 Jul 08;
The dwindling march of the penguins is signaling that the world's oceans are in trouble, scientists now say. Penguins may be the tuxedo-clad version of a canary in the coal mine, with generally ailing populations from a combination of global warming, ocean oil pollution, depleted fisheries, and tourism and development, according to a new scientific review paper.
A University of Washington biologist detailed specific problems around the world with remote penguin populations, linking their decline to the overall health of southern oceans.
"Now we're seeing effects (of human caused warming and pollution) in the most faraway places in the world," said conservation biologist P. Dee Boersma, author of the paper published in the July edition of the journal Bioscience. "Many penguins we thought would be safe because they are not that close to people. And that's not true."
Scientists figure there are between 16 to 19 species of penguins. About a dozen are in some form of trouble, Boersma wrote. A few, such as the king penguin found in islands north of Antarctica, are improving in numbers, she said.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists three penguin species as endangered, seven as vulnerable, which means they are "facing a high risk of extinction in the wild," and two more as "near threatened." About 15 years ago only five to seven penguin species were considered vulnerable, experts said.
And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has already listed one penguin species on its endangered list, is studying whether it needs to add 10 more.
The largest Patagonian penguin colony in the world is at Punta Tumbo, Argentina, but the number of breeding pairs there dropped in half from about 400,000 in the late 1960s to about 200,000 in October 2006, Boersma reported. Over a century, African penguins have decreased from 1.5 million breeding pairs to 63,000.
The decline overall isn't caused by one factor, but several.
For the ice-loving Adelie penguins, global warming in the western Antarctica peninsula is a problem, making it harder for them to find food, said Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology at the British Antarctic Survey, a top penguin scientist who had no role in the new report.
For penguins that live on the Galapagos island, El Nino weather patterns are a problem because the warmer water makes penguins travel farther for food, at times abandoning their chicks, Boersma said. At the end of the 1998 record El Nino, female penguins were only 80 percent of their normal body weight. Scientists have tied climate change to stronger El Ninos.
Oil spills regularly taint the water where penguins live off Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil and have contributed to the Punta Tumbo declines, Boersma said.
The problems may be different from place to place, but looking at the numbers for the species overall, "they do give you a clear message," Trathan said.
And this isn't just about the fate of penguins.
"What happens to penguins, a few years down the road can happen to a lot of other species and possibly humans," said longtime penguin expert Susie Ellis, now executive director of the International Rhino Foundation.
Penguin Population Plunge Points to Climate Havoc
Will Dunham, PlanetArk 3 Jul 08;
WASHINGTON - 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.
"Penguins are sentinels of the marine environment, and by observing and studying them, researchers can learn about the rate and nature of changes occurring in the southern oceans. As ocean samplers, penguins provide insights into patterns of regional ocean productivity and long-term climate variation," Boersma wrote in the study.
Most scientists recognize 17 species of penguins, and they live in Earth's southern hemisphere. Penguins are beautifully adapted to life in the ocean, residing in places as different as the warm Galapagos islands and icy Antarctica.
While a bit ungainly on land, they gracefully knife through the water, feeding on fish and other sea delicacies.
But many species have been experiencing population declines in Antarctica, Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand and the Falkland Islands, Boersma said.
The number of Galapagos penguins, the only species with a range that inches into the northern hemisphere, has slipped to around 2,500 birds, about a quarter of its total in the 1970s.
Anton Seimon of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which backed Boersma's work, said the findings illustrate the disruption that people have caused to penguins' ecosystems.
"These disruptions introduce instability into what had been somewhat stable populations. That instability means we don't really know what's going to be happening in the future. In many instances it does signify declines that may result, in the most drastic case, in extinctions," Seimon said. (Editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Eric Walsh)
