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  • RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

Enormous penguin population crashes by almost 90%

Mystery of ‘massive decline’ in colony that once covered the hills of an island off Antarctica.
King penguin colony at IIle aux Cochons at its maximum population in 1982

A 1982 photograph shows some of the half a million breeding pairs of king penguins on Ile aux Cochons in the Southern Ocean. Credit: H. Weimerskirch

The world’s second-largest penguin colony has collapsed in just a few decades, falling from half a million breeding pairs in the 1980s to just tens of thousands in 2017.

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Nature 560, 144 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05850-2

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