Why is this decline occurring among the Magellanic penguins?
Changes in the availability of prey due to both climate change and exploitation of the penguins’ food sources by commercial fisheries. There’s also oil pollution in the South Atlantic. There’s dumping from ships. For a while in the 1980s, 80 per cent of the dead penguins found along the coast were covered in oil. In 1994, we were able to get the Chubut authorities to move the oil tanker lanes further from the coast. That’s helped. But as the birds take these longer migrations in search of food, they sometimes find themselves outside of Chubut’s protected areas. Some of our tagged penguins have been located as far north as Brazil.
