penguin disaster as only two chicks survive from colony of 40,000 in antarctica

Now penguins life in Antarctica under in alarming stage. For the moment, sea ice is increasing and this is a problem for this species as it pushes the feeding place – the sea ice edge – farther away from their nesting place, study leader Yan Ropert-Coudert, from France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, told The Guardian.Thousands of Adélie penguin chicks have starved to death in Antarctica. Climate change has led to particularly thick sea ice, so parent penguins have had to travel further to find food – leaving their hungry chicks behind.French scientists, supported by the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), studied a colony on Petrels Island, Antarctica, with 18,000 breeding pairs. The region is commonly referred to as Terre Adélie (“Adélie Land”) due to the vast numbers of penguins that live there.This year, out of all the chicks born in the colony, only two survived. The researchers discovered thousands of unhatched eggs and dead chicks scattered in the snow.“This devastating event contrasts with the image that many people might have of penguins. It’s more like ‘Tarantino does Happy Feet’, with dead penguin chicks strewn across a beach in Adélie Land,” said Rod Downie, WWF’s head of polar programmes, in a statement.Four years ago, a similar event happened. The colony – then with 20,196 breeding pairs – didn’t produce a single surviving chick. "The risk of opening up this area to exploratory krill fisheries, which would compete with the Adélie penguins for food as they recover from two catastrophic breeding failures in four years, is unthinkable," said Downie.