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Category: Climate change | Date: Jul 04 2008 | By: admin

Richard Leakey yesterday talked about the effects of climate change in East Africa in which he predicted major weather changes due to the melting of ice in Antarctica.

According to Dee Boersma, a biology professor at Washington University in Seattle, penguins are the first victims of climate change. Their populations have already begun to crash over the past there decades in Argentina, and declined to 63,000 from 1.5 million a century ago in South Africa.

Why do I care? Because penguins are the stars of my all time favourite film “March of the Penguins” which in 2005 probably suffered from a colony-wide breeding failure due to climate change. I can’t bear the thought!

Dee describes penguins as the“canary in the coal mine,” and their declining numbers are evidence that people are altering the animals’ environment. She also suggests that fish species eaten by penguins are disappearing due to our seafood diet as well as global warming effects on ocean currents. Unstable ice in the Antarctic broke up earlier than normal in 2006, forcing two-month-old chicks that couldn’t survive the cold water to swim, Boersma said. Can you imagine that? Her study will be published in the July/August edition of the U.S. journal BioScience.

Unrelated to this, Seamus of Kilimanjaro Lions talked about a new software for identifying penguins in massive colonies. Great idea but what if there are no penguins to study in the future?

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Tags: antarctica, Climate change, melting glaciers, penguins, richard leakey

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