Wipeout of penguin chicks dubbed ‘Tarantino does Happy Feet’
A colony of more than 18,000 pairs of Adelie penguins suffered a catastrophic breeding season.
An environmental group has likened the death of thousands of penguin chicks to a hypothetical film it has dubbed “Tarantino does Happy Feet”.
The WWF, which supported the research, urged governments meeting in Hobart, Australia, this week to approve a new marine protection area off East Antarctica.
“It’s more like ‘Tarantino does Happy Feet’, with dead penguin chicks strewn across a beach in Adelie Land,” he said.
Happy Feet was a feel-good animated film about a dancing penguin – a world away from the violence and death usually seen in Quentin Tarantino films.
“Not only did the chick starve but the partner (which stayed behind) also had to endure a long fast,” said Yan Ropert-Coudert, a marine ecologist with the French science agency CNRS.
Ropert-Coudert, who leads the study of seabirds at the Dumont D’Urville Antarctic research station, said the Adelie colony there numbers about 18,000 pairs which have been monitored since the 1960s. A similar breeding loss was observed for the first time during a 2013-2014 research expedition.
Sea ice extent in the polar regions varies each year, but climate change has made the fluctuation more extreme.
Ropert-Coudert said creating a protection zone in the D’Urville Sea-Mertz region, where the colony is located, would not prevent larger-than-usual sea ice, but it might ease the pressure on penguins from tourism and over-fishing.
