As many as 2,000 penguins die in large numbers and are launched on the beach, is overfishing of prey fish and rapid climate change affected?
It was reported that about 2,000
Around 2,000 penguins wash up dead on Uruguay coast
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-penguins-dead-uruguay-coast.html
Thousands of Penguins Mysteriously Washed Up Dead in South America : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/thousands-of-penguins-mysteriously-wash-up-dead-in-south-america
Uruguay's Ministry of Environment's Department of Animals has reported that as many as 2,000 Magellanic penguins have died on beaches in July 2023 alone. You can see the sight of a large number of penguin corpses being washed up on the beach in the news video below.
Dos mil pingüinos apparecen muertos en Uruguay - YouTube
Three dead penguins lie face up on the beach.
There are other penguin corpses in the surrounding area, making it an unusual sight.
Most of the penguins that have been launched are still young individuals, and it is believed that they died in the Atlantic Ocean and were washed up on the beach. Carmen Leizagoyen of the Ministry of the Environment told AFP of overseas media, ``These penguins died in the water. It was done,' he commented.
According to Leizagoyen, bird flu was negative in all samples tested, and it was not a mass death due to an epidemic of bird flu. Although the exact cause is unknown, it has been pointed out that rapid climate change may be behind the mass deaths.
Magellan penguins that inhabit the Atlantic coast make a colony in the southern part of Argentina, but when the southern hemisphere winters, they move north in search of food and warm water and move their homes to the coast of Brazil. It is common for a few percent of individuals to die at this time, but in recent years there have been frequent cases of mass death on the Atlantic coast of South America.
For example, more than 550 penguins died of hunger on beaches in Brazil in 2010, 745 dead penguins washed up in 2012, and at least 354 penguins died in a heat wave in Argentina in 2019. confirmed to have died.
In this case, experts believe that a subtropical cyclone off the coast of Uruguay may have overwhelmed the already starving penguins, causing them to die of hypothermia. Animal welfare group SOS Rescate de Fauna Marina said in a Facebook post that the penguin's thick layer of fat and feathers protects it from the cold, but a combination of factors, including starvation and fat loss, can lead to hypothermia. I explained that I would die.
'In the 1990s and 2000s, we began to see animals starved for food,' Richard Tesoro of animal rights group SOS Marine Wildlife Rescue told AFP. I'm doing it, 'he suggested that overfishing by human fishing may have led to the mass death of Magellanic penguins.
Also, Science Alert, a scientific media, said, ``Overfishing is also a big factor, but changes in weather patterns due to climate change may also change the distribution of major marine organisms.'' ``Unless something changes, these mass deaths will be It could become an annual thing,' he said.
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