Penguins are cute, in their blue and white combination, little hands, cute little feet, above all the cutest famous penguin walk! The penguins lie in orderly, evenly spaced rows, wings splayed, their trademark glossy blue plumage dulled by sand. There are 183 in all, carefully collected by local people, laid out, and photographed for later investigation. The birds were found at Ninety Mile Beach last week, just the latest in a phenomenon of dead penguins washing up on New Zealand’s beaches in huge numbers.
The kororā, also known as little blue penguins, is the world’s smallest penguin and is native to New Zealand. They have been a common sight on northern coastlines, seen hopping up the dunes at dusk with their characteristic, slightly stooped waddle, however, the Department of Conservation (DoC) classes their population as “at-risk, declining”.
More than 500 of the world’s smallest penguins have mysteriously washed up dead on beaches across New Zealand over the past couple of months. Experts aren’t exactly sure what has been killing off such a large number of the adorable seabirds, but they suspect that climate change may have played a role.
The largest cluster was a group of 183 dead birds that washed up last week on Ninety Mile Beach near Kaitaia; another 109 penguins were found on that same beach in early May. An additional group of around 100 dead penguins also washed up last week on Cable Bay near Nelson, although the exact number is unclear. New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) has now revealed that multiple other die-offs have been reported on beaches across North Island, ranging from a couple to dozens of bodies.
It was not immediately clear what killed the penguins, but experts have noted that most of the dead seabirds were significantly underweight. Little penguins should weigh between 1.8 and 2.2 pounds (0.8 to 1 kilogram), but some of the bodies weighed less than half that much. “There was just no body fat on them; there was hardly any muscle to show,” Graeme Taylor, a DOC seabird scientist, told to the news agency. “When they get to that stage of emaciation, they can’t dive,” which eventually causes them to starve or die of hypothermia because they lack a protective layer of blubber, he added.
The malnourishment of the dead penguins shows that they have not been eating enough fish, their preferred food, which could be a sign of overfishing by humans. But Taylor suspects that rising ocean surface temperatures caused by climate change and a prolonged cyclical event known as La Niña have forced the fish into deeper, cooler waters, where the birds can no longer reach them.
“This little species [of penguin] can dive down to 20 or 30 meters [66 to 98 feet] routinely, but it’s not that good at diving a lot deeper than that,” Taylor said. (Ironically, the little penguins’ genus, Eudyptula, means “good little diver” in Latin.)
This hypothesis could explain why little penguins from New Zealand’s South Island have remained unaffected because the waters there have remained much cooler near the surface than waters farther north. This is not the first time little penguins have died in large numbers in New Zealand. Die-offs of dozens, or even hundreds, of little penguins have occurred about once every decade, on average, due to either feeding difficulties or extreme storms. However, this is the third time a die-off has happened in the past 10 years, which is worrying, Taylor said.
Unfortunately, New Zealanders can likely expect to see more dead penguins washing up on their shorelines.
