The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: 60,000 African Penguins Starved to Death Because of Climate Change
Dear Diary. Climate change works like a line of dominoes falling. If one falls others are likely to fall unless we can disrupt the line by stopping carbon pollution. In the case of species extinction or decline, we see dominoes falling practically every year because of disruption of the food chain. Yes, the food chain can be part of that climate change dominoes analogy. This week I’ve learned that at least 60,000 South African penguins have perished over the last couple of decades because a species of sardines they feed on can’t survive or can’t adapt to warming seas off that country’s coast.
Here are more details from the Guardian:
60,000 African penguins starved to death after sardine numbers collapsed – study
Climate crisis and overfishing contributed to loss of 95% of penguins in two breeding colonies in South Africa, research finds
African penguins hunting sardines near Cape Town. The species is critically endangered, with fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs left. Photograph: Peter Verhoog/Minden Pictures/Alamy
Fri 5 Dec 2025
More than 60,000 penguins in colonies off the coast of South Africa have starved to death as a result of disappearing sardines, a new paper has found.
More than 95% of the African penguins in two of the most important breeding colonies, on Dassen Island and Robben Island, died between 2004 and 2012. The breeding penguins probably starved to death during the moulting period, according to the paper, which said the climate crisis and overfishing were driving declines.
The losses that researchers recorded in those colonies were not isolated, said the paper, which was published in Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology. “These declines are mirrored elsewhere,” said Dr Richard Sherley, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter. The African penguin species has undergone a population decline of nearly 80% in 30 years.
African penguins shed and replace their worn-out feathers every year to protect their insulation and waterproofing. However, during the moulting period, which takes about 21 days, they have to stay on land. To survive this fasting period, they need to fatten up beforehand. “If food is too hard to find before they moult or immediately afterwards, they will have insufficient reserves to survive the fast,” said Sherley. “We don’t find large rafts of carcasses – our sense is that they probably die at sea,” he said.
For every year except three since 2004, the biomass of the sardine species Sardinops sagax had fallen to 25% of its maximum abundance off the coast of western South Africa, the study found. The fish are a key food for African penguins. Changes in the temperature and salinity off the west coast of Africa have made the fishes’ spawning less successful. Levels of fishing, however, have remained high in the region.
In 2024, African penguins were classified as critically endangered, with fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs left.
More sustainable fisheries management could improve the penguins’ chances of survival. Conservationists are taking action on the ground, by building artificial nests to shelter chicks, managing predators and hand-rearing adults and chicks who need rescuing. Commercial purse-seine fishing, which involves encircling a school of fish with a large net and then trapping them by closing the bottom, has been banned around the six largest penguin-breeding colonies in South Africa.
It is hoped this will “increase access to prey for penguins at critical parts of their life cycle”, said the study co-author Dr Azwianewi Makhado, from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment in South Africa.
Lorien Pichegru, a professor of marine biology at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, who was not involved in the study, said the results were “extremely concerning” and highlighted decades-long mismanagement of small fish populations in South Africa. “The results of the study are only based on penguins’ survival until 2011, but the situation has not improved over time,” she said.
Pichegru said addressing extremely low levels of small fish stocks required urgent action, “not only for African penguins but also for other endemic species depending on these stocks”.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Tuesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)