The decline of penguin numbers worldwide is a sign of catastrophic change in the worlds' oceans and can be blamed on a number of factors says a team from the University of Washington.
Image: Penguin & chick. Credit: pixie_bebe/flickr
Scientists led by Dee Boersma, a UW biology professor and penguin expert has found that, while climate change is an important factor in the decline in numbers of penguin species, loss of habitat through coastal development, pollution and depletion of fisheries are also reasons for the dramatic fall.
"Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world," Boersma said. "The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins."
Boersma added there are sixteen to nineteen penguin species spread throughout forty-three geographical sites, mostly in the southern hemisphere. She says that most of their sites are not monitored so dramatic population declines have mostly gone unnoticed.
Like the canary in the coalmine,Boersma maintains penguins act as a sentinel for the damage we are doing to the environment and advocates an international co-operative effort to check on the populations of the birds at five-yearly intervals.
"We have to be able to understand the world that we live in and depend on," she said. "It is the responsibility of governments to gather the information that helps us understand and make it available, but if they can't do it then we need non-governmental organizations to step up."
In partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society and colleagues from the University of Washington, Boersma has studied the world's largest breeding colony of Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo on the Atlantic coast of Argentina and seen breeding pairs fall from 400,000 pairs between the 1960s and 1980s to around half that today. Other drastic declines have been noted in Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, the Falklands Islands and Antarctica.
Boersma says though climate change is an important factor in penguin population decline, other factors such as oil pollution and the depletion of food stocks are equally to blame.
"As the fish humans have traditionally eaten get more and more scarce, we are fishing down the food chain and now we are beginning to compete more directly with smaller organisms for the food they depend on," she said in a UW statement.
Adding that the rising number of humans was having a detrimental effect on the planet's wildlife, she urged closer monitoring of these negative outcomes.
"I don't think we can wait. In 1960 we had 3 billion people in the world. Now it's 6.7 billion and it's expected to be 8 billion by 2025," she said. "We've waited a very long time. It's clear that humans have changed the face of the Earth and we have changed the face of the oceans, but we just can't see it. We've already waited too long."
"The Discovery Channel and public television are very popular for their nature programs, and those featuring penguins are especially popular. But we don't want to just have them in our television sets. We want to have them out in the world."
Prof. Boersma's research appears in the journal BioScience.
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