Hundreds of penguins have been found dead on New Zealand beaches since May – Environment – Life

Hundreds of people Corora penguins native to New Zealand have been starving to death since last month. A phenomenon linked to warming waters on the coast of the country’s North Island, exacerbated by the climate crisis.

is rated as About 500 penguins have died since the beginning of May While the exact number of deaths is unknown, “certainly the numbers reported on those northern beaches are higher than would normally be expected,” said Graeme Taylor, a seabird expert at the New Zealand Ministry of Conservation.

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Deaths of Korora, which mainly inhabit islands off the coast of New Zealand, were reported from May 2 from the Tokerau coast in the northern part of the North Island to the Auckland coast.

Records of these deaths are given in May and June, in which LAdult birds flock to New Zealand beaches to build nests. A huge effort for them as they have to walk about 1.5 kilometers and climb 300 meters to find the right place in bushes, holes or caves and sometimes houses or sheds.

About 25 centimeters in size, the Eutyptula minor penguins, blue in color with a white chest, died of starvation, New Zealand officials confirmed, according to preliminary analyzes of some of the remains. They ruled out that these deaths were related to diseases or toxins.

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The penguin carcasses were “half their normal weight, 1.5 kilograms, They have no fat in their muscles and their muscle mass is reduced. They were in bad shapeTaylor explained that the deaths occurred only in the northern subspecies, not in the south where the water is colder.

An endangered species

The death of the Korora species, classified as endangered in New Zealand, has been linked to a double warming of water, particularly due to human development in coastal areas and the introduction of new predators such as dogs. Created by La Niña phenomenon and influx of tropical water from the north.

This “rare situation” has had an effect on these penguins They could not follow the fish, which could not fly and moved towards the cooler water From the south or submerged beyond 30 meters, food could not be found, a Defense Ministry official asserted.

That’s expected to continue for a few months until ocean temperatures settle into the southern winter, with the risk of starvation “where penguins try to leave food elsewhere,” Taylor suspects, though it’s a trend in the long run.

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“These events happen frequently, I think this is the third in the last five or six years. It rarely happens once a decade … and the long-term impact is that these birds don’t have time to recover. And breed in between.” These events and populations will continue to decline,” Taylor lamented about heat waves.

More than a thousand penguin species have had mass die-offs recorded by New Zealand authorities in their territory.n 4,734 penguins died in 1974, 1985 (5,386) and 1998 (3,517).. Data on deaths this year is still being collected.

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