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Anyone who’s seen March of the Penguins knows this: It ain’t easy being emperor. Like the polar bear on the opposite pole, the emperor penguin endures almost unfathomable hardships to breed and nurture each new generation — fasting for months through the planet’s harshest winter weather, sustained only by stored energy from a long-ago feed from the sea. If its onshore waddle doesn’t exactly confer nobility on the emperor, its remarkable underwater grace and adapted ability to survive such precarious conditions surely do. Yet these extraordinary birds increasingly face new and extraordinary pressures to which they almost certainly cannot adapt fast enough — most ominously, the rapid acceleration of global warming. And the emperor is not alone: more than half of the world’s 19 penguin species are in danger of extinction.
ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROFILE
PROTECTION STATUS: The Galapagos penguin is the only penguin listed under the Endangered Species Act.
PETITIONED: 2006, for 12 penguin species. In July 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that 10 of the 12 petitioned-for species may warrant protection under the Act. The Snares crested and royal penguins were found not to warrant protection.
RANGE: Penguin species covered by our scientific petition range from emperors in the Antarctic, to rockhopper and macaroni penguins at the tip of South America, to the Humboldt penguin along the coasts of Chile and Peru; and from the African penguin on South Africa’s lower coast to eight species in New Zealand.
THREATS: Global warming exacerbates additional unique and specific threats to the 12 species in our petition — ranging from introduced predators, disease, habitat destruction, breeding colony disturbance, and even egg harvest, to oil spills, ocean pollution, depletion of prey by industrial fisheries, and entanglement in deadly fishing gear.
POPULATION TREND: All of the petitioned-for penguin species have shown dramatic declines in the 20 th century, with many of them suffering 50 percent or greater declines in just the last 20 to 30 years. Global warming has already been linked to population declines in numerous species, including the more than 50-percent decline in Pointe Geologie’s emperor penguin colony, of March of the Penguins fame.
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SAVING PENGUINS
Krill, the keystone of the Antarctic marine ecosystem and an essential food source for penguins, as well as for whales and seals, has declined by as much 80 percent since the 1970s over large areas of the Southern Ocean. The chief culprit: global warming, which wreaks havoc on ocean life by warming water temperatures and causing shifts in currents essential to productivity.
Already faced with scarcer prey due to a rapidly changing environment, many penguin species also compete with industrial fisheries for food. And for many penguins — not just the famously resolute emperor — survival and reproduction rely on a delicate balance, to which a single disruption can become catastrophic. For instance, each of two recent El Niño years decimated Humboldt penguin populations along the coast of Chile and Peru, calving of an iceberg off Antarctica resulted in reproductive failure for an entire emperor colony, and a major oil spill off the South African coast wiped out many thousands of African penguins.
Determined to keep global warming from finally tipping the odds too heavily against survival of the planet’s penguins, the Center filed a scientific petition in 2006 to gain Endangered Species Act protection for 12 of the most imperiled penguin species. In July 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that 10 species — the emperor, erect-crested, Fiordland crested, white-flippered, macaroni, Humboldt, African, yellow-eyed and northern and southern rockhoppers — may warrant federal protection. But the Service missed its deadline to actually bestow that protection on any of the petitioned-for penguins, prompting the Center to file suit in February 2008 to compel the agency to take action. We’re also on the frontlines of the fight for sounder, saner state and national climate policy and the swift, dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions necessary to curb global warming.
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Contact: Kassie Siegel
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