nationalgeographic.com
Inside the Collapse of Earth's Largest Penguin Colony
In the storm-driven wilderness between South America’s southern cape and the frozen boundary of mainland Antarctica, the South Sandwich Islands form an isolated, crescent-shaped archipelago of rock and ice. Its rugged, northernmost isle, Zavodovski Island—where chinstraps and macaroni penguins blanket the hillsides that surround an active volcano—has held the title of the largest penguin colony on Earth. But as chinstrap penguins began facing steep decline across the Antarctic Peninsula starting in the 1980, scientists wondered whether this remote island was faring any better. Through an analysis combining aerial drone surveys and manual population counts, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have discovered that in fewer than fifteen years, the island’s chinstrap population has plummeted by 63 percent—a loss of over half a million penguins. Their findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, identifies the island as home to the fastest-declining chinstrap population in the world, with climate-driven losses documented continuously since 2011. The decline wipes out more than a quarter of the total penguin population on Zavodovski, ceding the island's title of world's largest penguin colony to Cape Adare in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. “A 63 percent loss in 15 years means over half a million nests are gone...
