Climate Change in Argentina Kills Chicks: Baby Penguin Deaths Soar

Punta Tombo, a patch of seashore along the coast of Argentina, is home to hundreds of thousands of penguins and contains the world's largest population of Magellanic penguins. Unfortunately, they may not be able to call it their home for much longer.

Dee Boersma is a conservation biologist at the University of Washington who has been traveling to Punta Tombo for the past 30 years. She recently discovered that the changing climate is killing the Magellanic penguins. However, the well-being of the penguins at Punta Tombo has been a concern of Boersma's since 2003, when she recorded a drop in the penguin population by 20%.

"One of the things that I certainly didn't anticipate when I started this is that these penguins could tell us as much as I think they are ... about the environment," said Boersma in this NPR article.

The depopulation of the penguins was not the only catalyst for Boersma's assertion. She also discovered that penguins had begun swimming farther than usual to find food. This information, provided by electronic tags that she attached to the penguins, led her to believe that the squid (one of the penguin's main sources of food) were being pushed farther out to sea due to climate change.

But she finally figured out the primary cause for the decrease in penguin population. In 2010, Boersma had recorded that Punta Trombo was experiencing bigger, stronger, and wetter rainstorms, which resulted in thousands of deaths of penguin chicks.

"You have to really know penguins to understand why," she said in the same NPR article. "Chicks are covered in down. Their juvenile plumage doesn't even really come in to protect them at all until they are older than 40 days. So until they get some of their juvenile plumage, they're not waterproof - at all."

The local weather records show that the rainfall has become more and more frequent over the years, and such an environment is not safe for the penguin chicks. And with 30 years of data on Punta Trombo, Boersma's discovery will not go unnoticed.

To read more about these findings, visit the article on NPR's website.