King penguins could be wiped out by climate change: study

0 Comments | AFP, February, 2008

PARIS (AFP) — One of the emblems of the Antarctic, the king penguin, could be driven to extinction by climate change, a French study published on Monday warned.

In a long-term investigation on the penguins' main breeding grounds, investigators found that a tiny warming of the Southern Ocean by the El Nino effect caused a massive fall in the birds' ability to survive.

If predictions by UN scientists of ever-higher temperatures in coming decades prove true, the species faces a major risk of being wiped out, they say.

Second in size only to the emperor penguin, king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) live on islands on the fringes of Antarctica in the southern Indian Ocean, with an estimated population of two million breeding pairs.

The species is...