Near Extinction of Emperor Penguins Predicted by 2100

According to research based upon sea ice models from the IPCC report, Antarctica’s iconic Emperor Penguins could face extinction by the end of the century due to habitat loss.

By comparing observations spanning 43 years of population dynamics against models which project the declining levels of Antarctic sea ice, the study predicts that the giant penguins will be too slow to adapt to changes wrought by global warming.

The startling prediction is being called a conservative estimate by researchers, who claim that the data has as much as a four-in-five chance of being accurate. This number is particularly high because individual Emperor Penguins are long-lived and, as a result, biologically slow learners. Thus, they are unlikely to shift their breeding patterns fast enough to match the rapidly changing climate.

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As Hollywood’s documentary darlings, Emperor Penguins are to the Antarctic what Polar Bears are to the Arctic. Both species rely on extensive levels of secure ice cover to breed, feed and flourish. Unlike any other penguin, Emperors breed in the frigid Antarctic winter where temperatures typically plummet to -40 degrees Celsius, which are the coldest breeding conditions for any bird species in the world. Among colonies that often number in the hundreds, breeding pairs lay only one egg each season, which garners as much care from the father as from the mother. Throughout the harsh winter, each parent trades off egg-watching duties while the other hunts and feeds.

This is the first study of its kind to predict the eventual decline of an entire species, and it offers a powerful lesson to its long-lived human discoverers. While the study takes into consideration the unlikely odds of penguins adjusting their behavior to meet the changing climate, it doesn’t consider the odds of people changing their habits, to do everything they can to alter their impact on climate change. We can only hope that humans aren’t as slow to learn.

Currently, Emperor Penguins are under consideration for inclusion under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Image Credit: Martha de Jong-Lantink on Flickr under a Creative Commons License

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