Ocean Sentry
The world”s largest penguins could be pushed to the brink of extinction by the end of this century due to the melting of Antarctic sea ice caused by global climate change, scientists have said.
Researchers led by biologists Stephanie Jenouvrier and Hal Caswell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts used mathematical models to predict how climate warming and the resulting loss of sea ice would affect a big colony of emperor penguins at Terre Adelie, Antarctica.
Their models on average forecast a decline of 87 percent in the colony’s population – from the current 3000 breeding pairs to 400 breeding pairs by 2100. But some models predicted the colony’s population would plummet by at least 95 percent, placing the birds there at risk of extinction.
Terre Adelie is one of roughly 40 colonies of emperor penguins. The researchers viewed the fate of this colony as a possible example of what could happen to the entire species, now estimated at about 200,000 breeding pairs in all.
Since the 1960s, the number of emperor penguins in his colony already has dropped by half, Caswell said.
(From stuff.co.nz)
