cowboyji's Blog
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Eco Maniac: Death March of the Penguins
- Posted on 01.27.09
I was already upset about the polar bear problem in the Arctic. Well, now I have a new obsession to obsess about – penguins. Damn it all if they aren't in high levels of danger, too! I guess I shouldn't be surprised. This whole economic, I mean climate crisis is a global epidemic, after all. It just so happens that the penguins are only now stepping into the spotlight.
Starting back in late June, over 400 dead and barely living young penguins washed up on the shores of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil some 2,500 hundred miles from their homesteads in southern Patagonia. The whole thing caused a lot of head scratching. What the experts came up with was this: "The penguin population is intimately linked to their supplies of food, so this suggests something is happening to the population of fish they eat," thus spake biologist Marcelo Bertellotti at the National Patagonic Center in Puerto Madryn, Argentina. "It appears the penguins are not finding fish where they normally do, and one reason could be that warming waters and climate change have impacted the fish population."
Because some of the little black-and-white cuties were actually covered in oil which had led to hypothermia because the natural body oils that provide warmth and waterproofing was being eroded by the petroleum, an oil spill in Uruguay could also have been a culprit in the case of the dying fishes. Alternately, Erli Costa, a Federal University biologist, thinks climate change-related weather patterns are rapidly fluctuating and possibly altering ocean currents and making the seas more treacherous for the young swimmers.
Brazil aside, the World Wildlife Fund released a report that says climate change is, in fact, a huge issue in the life and potential extinction of penguins. The report specifies that an increase of just 3.6 more degrees Fahrenheit “which climate models forecast could be reached in as few as 40 years, would sharply reduce sea ice coverage in the Southern Ocean where penguins live, breed and feed. ...such significant warming and sea ice loss would likely lead to the marked decline or complete disappearance of many penguin colonies, including 50% of Emperor Penguins and 75% of Adélie Penguins.”
Temperatures along the western Antarctic Peninsula are warming at five times the rate of the rest of the planet and have gone up annually five degrees Fahrenheit over the last 50 years (The winter average has gone up nine degrees.), so the additional increase in our lifetimes is, by no means, out of the realm of distinct possibilities. The Adélie population has already dropped 50% on Antarctica's Petermann Island whereas the deep-diving Gentoos have blossomed in the warmer conditions.
Dr. Richard Moss, WWF's climate change VP, says, “The Arctic, the Antarctic Peninsula, sub-Antarctic islands and the Southern Ocean are warming rapidly – at rates well above the global average. As these regions continue to warm, species, including penguins and polar bears, are unwittingly serving as our sentinels. They are calling out attention to the ecological disruption and the wave of extinctions that climate change is bringing not just to those regions, but to the entire planet.”
If the penguins and polars don't make a great case for 'think globally, act locally,' then I don't know what to tell you.
Related causes: Animals, Environment
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