Climate Change Is Directly Responsible for Killing Baby Penguins

Being a baby penguin is no easy ride: To survive the chicks must escape starvation, the jaws of predators, and being beaten or pecked to death by other penguins. Now, on top of these dangers, there comes evidence the baby birds are facing another challenge to their existence: climate change, which is turning their habitats increasingly deadly.

Scientists have known for a while that the warming atmosphere is changing the global food chain, and that these alterations can starve seabirds. But a team of researchers that has been monitoring penguins since the 1980s alleges that more extreme weather is directly responsible for killing these birds, mainly through abnormal heat and powerful rainstorms. These worsening environmental stresses can decimate as much as half of a penguin-chick population in a year, they say in a new study in PLOS ONE.