Being a baby penguin in the era of uncontrolled emissions and global warming isn't easy at all. To survive, the chicks must escape not only the jaws of predators or other rival specimens, but also climate change, which is killing the chicks of the world's largest colony of Magellanic penguins.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
Be a penguin cub in the era of uncontrolled emissions and global warming it is not at all easy. To survive, the chicks must escape not only the jaws of predators or other rival specimens, but also climate change, which is killing the chicks of the world's largest colony of Magellanic penguins.
It is doing this not only indirectly, depriving them of food, as has been repeatedly documented for these and other seabirds, but directly, causing them to perish underor terrible storms or exceptional heat waves. They proved this in a new study on PLoS ONE researchers from the University of Washington.
Too big for parents to sit on and protect them, but still too young to have waterproof feathers, the chicks exposed to pouring rain they can die of hypothermia, despite their parents' best efforts. And during extreme heat, chicks without waterproofing cannot take a dip in the water to cool down and restore temperature, as adults do.
The research team, which has monitored penguins since 1980, argues that these worsening environmental stresses can decimate the population of the new born. They reached this grim conclusion after studying climate patterns and wildlife populations near Punta Tombo, home to some 400.000 Magellanic penguins on the Argentine coast.
They found that the amount of rainfall and the number of storms has increased in recent decades during the penguin breeding season. Sure, climate change isn't the number 1 killer of young penguins, but death numbers are likely to soar over the next few years. How explain researchers :
“Over a span of 27 years, an average of 65 percent of the chicks died each year, of which around 40 percent died from starvation. Climate change, a relatively new cause of chick death, has killed an average of 7 percent of chicks per year, but there have been years where it has been the most common cause of death, killing 43 percent of all year-old chicks and a good half in another ".
What will happen if climate change Will it make storms bigger and hotter times more intense?
Roberta Ragni
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