More Than 1,000 Magellenic Penguins Have Come Ashore In Brazil As Far North As The Equator In 2008

[hatrack]

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The sheer quantity of young penguins that have washed up on Brazil's sun-drenched beaches this year has confounded nearly everyone who comes in contact with them. Each summer and early fall, some gray-and-white Magellanic penguins could be expected to drift here, washed by ocean currents more than 2,000 miles north from their homes in southern Argentina near the bottom of the world.

This year is different. Like some maritime dust-bowl migration, more than 1,000 of these penguins have floated ashore in Brazil, nearly as far north as the equator. By the time their webbed feet touch sand, many are gaunt and exhausted, often having lost three-quarters of their body weight. Even more have died.

"This year is completely anomalous," said Lauro Barcellos, 51, an oceanographer who founded a rehabilitation center for penguins in southern Brazil. ". . . I've worked in this field for 35 years, and I have never seen anything like this."

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It is normal for Magellanic penguins, which spend months in the ocean, to leave their colonies in southern Argentina and ride the plankton-rich frigid waters of the Falkland Current, which flows north up the coast of South America from Antarctica, in search of sardines. The eddies from a second current, the Benguela of southwest Africa, travel across the Atlantic toward Brazil. While the penguins would normally turn back when they hit the warmer Benguela waters, the current has been "exceptionally cold" this year, Braga said. Adding to this, the Falkland Current, fortified by strong winds, has been particularly powerful. "This is a regular situation, but it's the intensification of this that we're trying to understand," Braga said. While climate change has been implicated in melting polar ice caps and the transformation of parts of the Amazon rain forest to drier savannah lands, some scientists say there is not enough data on how weather changes are driving these currents.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/02/AR2008100204225.html?sub=AR

[aquart]

1. The whole food chain is disrupted. Poor baby penguins.

How long before it reaches us?