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They survived the hunters: now king penguins face climate change
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Thousands of penguin (Manchots Royaux) are pictured on December 21, 2022 on the Possession Island, part of the Crozet Islands which are a sub-Antarctic archipelago of small islands in the southern Indian Ocean. The Crozet Islands form one of the five administrative districts of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. They are home to four species of penguins. Most abundant are the macaroni penguin, of which some 2 million pairs breed on the islands, and the king penguin, home to 700,000 breeding pairs; half the world's population. Mammals living on the Crozet Islands include fur seals and southern elephant seals. Killer whales have been observed preying upon the seals.
(AFP /Patrick Hertzog)
O
nce hunted to the brink of extinction, the thousands of king penguins that densely congregate on the remote Possession Island each year now face a new threat: climate change.
The birds spend most of their life at sea, but come breeding time in December half the world's population flock to the islands in the southern Indian Ocean's Crozet archipelago, roughly halfway between Antarctica and the southeastern tip of Africa.
Robin Cristofari, a specialist in penguins at Finland's University of Turku, looks out on a colony massed at a bay on Possession Island.
"This species was not very far from extinction" after being massacred by seal hunters from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th, he said.
When the hunters ran out of seals to kill, they used the penguins as fuel, burning them to melt seal blubber in cauldrons, said Cristofari.
For a short time they even made penguin oil, "but it was not good quality", he added.
The king penguin population rebounded in the latter half of the 20th century, but their numbers plateaued around 20 years ago.
