Endless fascination with penguins has always been reflected in our daily lives, in movies, shows, and commercials. Their charming looks captivate us as they look like well-mannered little beings ranging from 1 foot to 4 feet with tuxedos on. When you look at their large colonies, you can’t help but smile as they goofily waddle and hop across the ice. Their social cohesion and camaraderie are something that should inspire us all, to work together just as penguins do. Penguin parents are fiercely devoted to protecting their colony, especially their young and eggs, often becoming aggressive when threatened. Penguins are also remarkably similar to humans, even sharing feelings of grief. Pictured to the left, a German photographer, Tobias Baumgaertner, captured two penguins comforting each other after they had recently lost their partners. Sights like this, show us how penguins are not just their goofy selves, they are also intelligent creatures who feel as we do. Penguins also serve as a powerful symbol of the delicate balance in our natural world. Their well-being is intricately linked to the health of the oceans and polar regions they inhabit, showing us that penguins are sentinel animals and show us the current state of our oceans and world. Currently, this balance is being threatened as climate change has been rapidly deteriorating our world and the animals that inhabit Earth, side-by-side with us.  

 

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Penguins as sentinel animals, depend on us for their survival since we are the ones who control the state of how our oceans are. As children, reading stories about animals such as tigers or pandas made you hope for the possibility of seeing them in real life, however, that possibility is dwindling down. Since our climate crisis has been worsening resulting in global warming over the past decade, Grace Hussain, who has a Masters of Science for Animals, reported the near extinction of animals like the northern white rhino Norwegian wolf, Bornean orangutan, Sumatran elephant, Malayan tiger, giant panda, and many more have shown us the consequences of our actions. Penguins have been overlooked, but studies now show that penguins are in danger of extinction.  Scientists studying chinstrap penguins in the Antarctic have found that penguin populations have been drastically decreasing by as much as 77% since they were last surveyed 50 years ago. According to Dyan deNapoli, award winning author of The Great Penguin Rescue, he told Al Jazeera news, “The dramatic decline we’re seeing in their numbers is an indication that the overall health of the ecosystem they inhabit is also in decline. More simply stated, if penguins are dying, it means our oceans are dying. Which ultimately will impact other species, including humans." We cannot let penguins be another species that end up on an extinction list. The thought of penguins becoming a thought from the past is something that makes me incredibly sad, especially being that I hoped to one day see them.  With the populations declining, it is becoming alarmingly evident that penguins could go extinct from the impacts of climate change. 

 

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Our world has been constantly changing ever since its creation, and we as humans can account for changing with the times as we have evolved to adapt to these changes. So if climate change has been changing our world, why don’t animals just adapt? An evolutionary biologist at Yale University, Martha Munoz, studied the montane horned lizard in Mexico and found that the lizards had increased their heat tolerance by about a degree in one single year. This doesn’t apply to just the montane horned lizard as well. “This combination of genetic evolution and temporary environmental plasticity is also helping other types of species survive warmer temperatures, including the Acropora coral in American Samoa." Animals across all different sides of wildlife have been found to adapt to warming temperatures resulting from climate change and penguins have adapted to different environments as well.  Carl Bergmann, a German automonist made the eponymous rule which states that within organisms that inhabit different areas, the bigger species will be found in cooler environments while the smaller ones in warmer environments. In an article pubished by Natural History Musuem, they found an example of Bergmann's idea in penguin species. “For instance, the largest species of penguin, the emperor penguin, lives in Antarctica, while the smaller Humboldt penguins are found in South America." The eponymous rule goes to show that penguins are capable of adaptation and have done it before. 

 

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The best solution that can be implemented in order to help mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on penguin populations is marine protected areas. In order to create marine protected areas, it requires the approval of 24 different countries and the European Union according to the Pew Charitable Trust who is attempting to create new MPA's. Jonathan Handley, a marine ecologist, wrote an article, “How a new network of Marine Protected Areas would help penguins,” which explained the different benefits of marine protected areas. According to research conducted by BirdLife International and the British Antarctic Survey, mentioned in Handley's article, if proposed MPA’s in the most important sites for penguins, it would improve penguin area quality by about 49-100%. “Additionally, researchers found that although the Antarctic krill fishery has narrowed its fishing zones over the past 50 years, it still harvests a disproportionate amount of krill within important penguin feeding grounds. Since these tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans are a vital food source for many penguins, these results add significant weight to the MPA proposal – supporting information found in previous studies." As mentioned before, one of the biggest problems that penguins face because of the warmer climate is that their food sources are declining, especially krill. However, these marine protected areas, work to keep their food webs intact and would help penguins build resilience against climate change. Overall, marine protected areas would not only help penguin populations but it would also help save our biodiversity and other plants and animals. 

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