Climate change is 'killing Argentina's Magellanic penguin chicks'

[Max Rockatansky]

I doubt it will cause them to go extinct in our lifetimes, but it's clearly having an adverse impact on wildlife.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25950906

Penguin chicks in Argentina are dying as a direct consequence of climate change, according to new research.

Drenching rainstorms and extreme heat are killing the young birds in significant numbers.


The study, conducted over 27 years, looked at climate impacts on the world's biggest colony of Magellanic penguins, which live on the arid Punta Tombo peninsula.


The research has been published in the journal Plos One.


About 200,000 pairs of these penguins make their nests on the peninsula every year.


They reside there, in desert-like conditions, from September until February to hatch their young.


However, the life of a newborn chick is perilous, to say the least.


Downy death
They are too big for their parents to sit on top of and keep warm, but too young to have waterproof feathers.


As a result, they are particularly vulnerable to rainstorms. If they get drenched they usually die, despite the attentions of their despairing parents.


They can also succumb to extreme heat, as they cannot cool off in the water like the others.

The new analysis of data from Punta Tombo indicates that climate change is having an increasing impact on the chicks.


While on average, around 40% of the youngsters that die every year succumb to starvation, changes in the climate killed an average of 7%.
Warming 'killing penguin chicks'


"Climate variability in the form of increased rainfall and temperature extremes, however, has increased in the last 50 years and kills many chicks in some years," the authors write in the report.


In two years it was the most common cause, accounting for half the dead chicks in one year, and 43% in another.

[Cthulhu]

Nature is a cruel beast. The weather plays no favorites.

[Max Rockatansky]

Same goes for the Universe. We could all be dead by this time next year from a number of calamities.

My advice is to live each day as your last.

[waltky]

Mebbe a polar bear ate `em?...

Mass die-off of penguin chicks alarms researchers
Tue, Oct 17, 2017 - Almost the entire cohort of chicks from an Adelie penguin colony in the eastern Antarctic was wiped out by starvation last summer in what scientists say is only the second such incident in more than 40 years.

The mass die-off occurred because unusually large amounts of sea ice forced penguin parents to travel farther in search of food for their young, researchers said on Sunday. By the time they returned, only two out of thousands of chicks had survived. “Not only did the chick starve, but the partner [who stayed behind] also had to endure a long fast,” said Yan Ropert-Coudert, a marine ecologist with the French science agency CNRS.

Ropert-Coudert, who leads the study of seabirds at the Dumont D’Urville Antarctic research station, said the Adelie colony numbers about 18,000 pairs that have been monitored since the 1960s. A similar breeding loss was observed for the first time during a 2013-2014 research expedition.

‘UNUSUAL’

“It is unusual because of the size of the population concerned,” he said in an e-mail to reporters. “Zero breeding success years have been noted before elsewhere, but never for colonies of this size.” Sea ice extent in the polar regions varies each year, but climate change has made the fluctuation more extreme. The environmental group WWF, which supported the research, urged governments meeting in Hobart, Australia, this week to approve a new marine protection area off East Antarctica.

Rod Downie, head of polar programs for the group’s British branch, said the impact of losing thousands of chicks was dramatic for an otherwise hardy species such as Adelie penguins. “It’s more like ‘Tarantino does Happy Feet,’ with dead penguin chicks strewn across a beach in Adelie Land,” he said. Ropert-Coudert said creating a protection zone in the D’Urville Sea-Mertz region, where the colony is located, would not prevent larger-than-usual sea ice, but it might ease the pressure on penguins from tourism and overfishing.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worl.../17/2003680529