Photo by Kevin Loria
The beaches of Bahía in Brazil are usually crowded with sunbathers from around the globe. This time last year, however, thousands of unexpected visitors started arriving. Patagonian penguins washed up on the sandy shores, most of them were young, and already dead or fighting for survival more than 4,000 km from their normal habitat
Patagonia is home to many different species of penguin. The colonies for each species can contain more than a million penguins during high season and normally, they exist peacefully between the glaciers and ice-cold waters of Patagonia. In April and May of every year, as temperatures begin to drop, the millions of penguins that live in Patagonia start to prepare for the feeding season. They spend months at a time foraging for food up the coastline of South America, but last year, due to increasing ocean temperatures and a shift in currents, something happened during their annual food migration and thousands of penguins became lost at sea.
In December, 2,500 juvenile Magellan penguins began appearing on the shores of tropical Bahía. About half the penguins that were found on Brazilian beaches were dead, and the others were starving and very weak. Valeria Ruoppolo, an emergency veterinarian with the International Federation for Animal Welfare in São Paulo, coordinated the rescue of many of the penguins.
“Of the live ones, less than 50% survived,” she explains. “We always have a few strandings here and there. In 1994 and 2000 we had big strandings. But not like this. More than 2,000 penguins is unheard of.”
Experts and volunteers spent months caring for the 372 surviving penguins. They were then tagged and flown to Pelotas in Brazil before being released into the South Atlantic Ocean with a few adult penguins in the hope that they would be able to lead the young ones back to their home in Patagonia.
So why did this happen? How did these penguins, who as a colony have been making this journey annually since before Darwin, get it so tragically wrong?
Photo by Kevin Loria
Something fishy going on
“The penguin population is intimately linked to their supplies of food, so this suggests something is happening to the population of fish they eat,” says biologist Marcelo Bertellotti from the National Patagonian Centre in Puerto Madryn, Argentina.
Experts and researchers speculate that climate change is mainly to blame for the changes in fish numbers. Ruoppolo explains in 2008 “the surface of the Atlantic Ocean was one degree Celsius warmer. The penguins follow the fish, especially their favourite, anchovies. Probably what happened this year is the anchovies went deeper into the ocean for the cold water. The penguins couldn’t reach their food and became stranded because they were starving.”
Worldwide, global warming has caused ocean temperatures to rise slowly for the last 20 years, normally a fraction of a degree annually. However in Patagonia, between 2005 and 2008, ocean temperatures rose much more rapidly, indicating that the process is speeding up, putting more pressure on the marine environment.
Furthermore, World Wildlife Federation (WWF) scientist Sybille Klenzendorf predicted that penguins would suffer from the ocean changes exacerbating the already diminishing fish numbers, due to aggressive commercial fishing in the region. During nesting season, penguins had to swim comparatively further distances each day to feed and to find suitable food for their young.
“We find lots of penguins here with catfish bones in them, which they normally don’t eat,” Muniz said. “That suggests they’re not finding their normal fish.” Saltwater catfish are lower in fat than the cold-water fish penguins usually eat, so provide them with less thermal protection meaning they could not survive as long in the cold waters.
This year was especially bad for fish levels, as an oil spill off the coast of Uruguay in May killed a large proportion of the fish on which migrating penguins rely for food. A week after the accident, dozens of penguins and other marine mammals such as sea lions were also found dead on the shores of the Uruguayan capital Montevideo.
Adding to the penguin’s predicament are the melting icecaps in the Antarctic. Global climate change has caused massive volumes of fresh water to be introduced into the salty waters of the South Atlantic. This also changes ocean currents, which according to the WWF, confused the migrating penguins and sent them too far north last year
Human activities, such as oil drilling, aggravate the problem and cause irreversible changes in the pH balance of the water. This drives fish away, into more suitable waters and makes hunting more challenging for the penguins accustomed to salt water.
What does the future hold?
Klenzendorf recently warned: “If the earth’s surface temperatures rise two more degrees – which is expected within 50 years – other species, namely the Emperor and Adelie penguins, and various Antarctic wildlife will become severely endangered.”
This is yet more bad news for the penguins of Patagonia, whose colonies have already been dramatically reduced because of improper use of fishing nets off the southern shores of Argentina.
Photo by Kevin Loria
Punta Tomba is the largest Magellan penguin colony in the world, yet no other colony is as easily accessible to the public. High volumes of tourism both help and hinder the conservation efforts. Whilst money generated from visitors helps fund and run environmental projects in the area, the average 105,000 annual visitors to the colony disturb the birds and alter their natural behaviour, according to Dee Boersma, a penguin expert based at the reserve’s research centre in Punta Tomba.
As climate change brings more rainfall to the region, the future of the colony is placed even further in harm’s way. Boersma explains: “As coastal Patagonia is normally very dry, the increasing rains mean that wet penguin chicks die of exposure.”
The decreasing colonies do not only affect the resident penguins. Boersma explains how “penguins are sentinels of the marine environment. By observing and studying them, researchers can learn about the rate and nature of changes occurring in the southern oceans.”
So the future looks somewhat bleak for everyone’s favourite flightless bird. The regional governments in Patagonia commented after the events of last December that the economy is just as fragile as the environment and dissuading tourism would be catastrophic for the region’s human residents. It has, however, pledged to impose stricter rules and more penguin-only zones to protect the bird’s habitats.
But unless the world as a whole begins to comprehend the reality of global warming, we will have to heed Sybille Klenzendorf’s warning: “In the future, it’s probably not going to be unusual for these things to happen.”
The post Patagonian Penguins in Peril appeared first on The Argentina Independent.