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A drop in the penguin population

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University of Washington professor 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 last 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. Read more from Times staff writer Kenneth R. Weiss at Greenspace, The Times’ environmental blog.

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University of Washington

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