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Magellanic penguins face harm from overfishing.
The Magellanic penguins of Punta Tombo don't tap dance like the cartoon birds from the movie Happy Feet, but they do sing. Each summer, hundreds of thousands of the birds converge on a bit of Patagonian coastline to breed among the desert shrubs. It's the world's largest colony of Magellanic penguins, and all together they raise quite a ruckus.
"They're brayers," says Elizabeth Skewgar, an ecologist who has studied the birds. "The word 'cacophony' comes to mind."
Skewgar, a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, is worried that a nearby experimental anchovy fishery, approved in 2003, might one day quiet the party at Punta Tombo.
Oily anchovies provide a high-energy meal for penguins, sea lions, dolphins and cormorants, to name but a few. The pivotal role these tiny fish play in the food chain means that depleting their stocks could cause an ecological conundrum that the Magellanic penguins won't be able to dance their way out of.
