Penguin chicks have perished more and more over the past years on the Argentinian coast's Punta Tombo peninsula due to climate change LiveScience reported Thursday.
Scientists for see the conditions degenerating this century according to a study researchers did at the University of Washington.
"They have to have waterproof feathers to survive," Dee Boersma, one of the authors on the study told LiveScience. "If chicks don't have waterproof plumage, they are going to die as soon as they end up in the water," Boersma told LiveScience.
Scientists found the 400,000 penguins evaluated died off from mostly hypothermia, but also starvation, and falling to prey when conducting the study from 1983 until 2010. Hypothermia resulted from rainstorms as the study went on LiveScience reported.
Researchers went to the penguins' nest up to two times daily from the middle of September to until the end of February in order to see how the group was doing as a whole, and check on the birds' health and well-being after they sprung out their shells towards the end of November, or beginning of December.
"I think that [penguin] pairs that have good burrows probably wouldn't suffer much of an effect, but it might be harder for pairs that have not competed successfully for where to make their burrow," David Ainley, a senior wildlife ecologist at H.T. Harvey and Associates, a ecological consulting firm told LiveScience. "Shallow burrows, or no burrow at all - those would be the ones that are most affected by rain." Ainley did not partake in the study.
"I don't think it is a real stretch to make that kind of connection," Wayne Trivelpiece, a Antarctic peguin researcher at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center told LiveScience. "But the actual hard evidence will come many decades down the road," Trivelpiece told LiveScience.
