These Beloved Penguins May Be Doomed
Source: Gizmodo
These Beloved Penguins May Be Doomed
Rae Paoletta
Today 12:21pm
It seems like everything on this trash planet is doomed to go extinct before humans do, much to my chagrin. The woeful tale of New Zealand’s yellow-eyed penguin is no different: the adorable bird—which even makes an appearance on the country’s currency—is dangerously close to extinction, at least at one well-monitored mainland breeding ground. And it’s (probably) all our fault.
A new study published today in PeerJ suggests that these endangered penguins could become locally extinct in the next 25 years, in part due to rising ocean temperatures as a result of climate change. According to models from a team of researchers at the University of Otago, increasingly warm waters will decrease the penguins’ chances of producing more offspring each summer. The team’s analysis suggests penguins at a well-studied mainland breeding ground, and possibly the mainland at large, would go extinct by 2060. But after factoring in massive die-off events like one in 2013, they concluded D-Day could come much sooner.
“When including adult survival rates from 2015 into the models the mean projection predicts Yellow-eyed penguins to be locally extinct in the next 25 years,” Dr. Stefan Meyer, a co-author on the study, said in a statement. Though their populations on New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula is already dwindling pretty rapidly, about 60 percent of the Yellow Eyed Penguin population lives on the sub-Antarctic Auckland and Campbell Islands. However, not much scientific research has been dedicated to these birds.
What we do know is that sadly, only about 1,700 breeding pairs of yellow-eyed penguin are left, making it one of the rarest penguins in the world.
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Read more: http://gizmodo.com/these-beloved-penguins-may-be-doomed-1795255289
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