Patagonian penguin populations plunging

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P. Dee Boersma fell in love many years ago with a flightless bird that does its soaring underwater. Looking at the penguin and chicks above, it’s easy to see why. Now she’s delivering some heart-breaking news about the focus of her affection and decades of fieldwork. The largest colony of Patagonian penguins, also known as Magellanic penguins, has plunged by about 22% over the past two decades.

Reasons abound. As Boersma explains in the latest issue of BioScience, these sentinels of marine health are being devastated by overfishing, oily pollution and even pressure from hordes of tourists.

Parent penguins have to swim an extra 40 miles to find prey than they did a decade ago. Penguins lose their feathery insulation from the cold when they get oiled by ships dumping contaminated ballast water. More than 100,000 tourists visited the colony in the past decade.

Boersma, a University of Washington professor, vows to continue her penguin studies. She and the Wildlife Conservation Society, joined by Argentinian officials, managed in the 1980s to stop this colony of penguins from being turned into so many golf gloves by a Japanese company. Other threats are harder to turn around.

‘The fundamental problem is that we are not managing people well,’ Boersma said. ‘We are out of balance with the world. That’s what penguins are telling us.’

-- Kenneth R. Weiss

, University of Washington