Magellan Penguins

Here's another example of our devotion to animals. Conservation biologist, P. Dee Boersma, in an interview in the New York Times, talks about the public outcry that ensued in the early 1980s in Argentina when a Japanese company wanted to harvest the country's penguins for oil, protein and gloves. "This was during a military dictatorship when dissidents were being thrown into the ocean from airplanes,' Boersma notes. "And yet people said, 'We object to having our penguins harvested.'"

All of which was lucky for Boersma because she got to study the colony of Magellanic penguins that inhabits Punta Tombo, in Argentina and has been doing so ever since 1982. What she has learned is that global warming is very real.

The penguins, according to Boersma, are having to travel farther and farther from the nest to find food, leaving their mates who are keeping the egg warm, starving for longer periods of time. And the ones that return are equally as exhausted. Which means they are laying their eggs on average, three days later than they did, forcing the hatching chicks to leave for sea at a time when it may not be the most opportune. Yes, even three days makes a huge difference.

The Punta Tomba penguin colony has declined 22% since 1987. That is a significant number. It is both climate change and human exploitation (overfishing and pollution) that has led to a decline in the penguins' food source. When they travel farther afield, they leave the protected areas, and run smack into real danger.

"The big thing is that penguins are showing us that climate change has already happened," says Boersma. "The birds are trying to adapt. But evolution is not fast enough to allow them to do that, over the long term."

Boersma hopes that the boundaries of the protected areas will increase but realizes that the time may come when hungry penguins turn up searching for food on private beaches. And then what?

More evidence that we need to clean up our act, big time.