Most penguin species in rapid decline

[Barrett808]

Penguins are on the verge of a precipitous decline, one conservation group warns.

A combination of changing weather patterns, overfishing, pollution, and other factors have conspired against the aquatic, flightless birds, according to a long-running study conducted by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

The study's findings were presented today by University of Washington professor and WCS scientific fellow Dr. P. Dee Boersma at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago.

…

"Penguins are having trouble with food on their wintering grounds and if that happens they're not going to come back to their breeding grounds," she said. "If we continue to fish down the food chain and take smaller and smaller fish like anchovies, there won't be anything left for penguins and other wildlife that depend on these small fish for food."

(more)

http://desdemonadespair.blogspot.com/2009/02/most-penguin-species-in-rapid-decline.html

[stuntcat]

1. k

r

"Of the world's 17 species of penguins 12 are rapidly declining"

(I have to go to dinner with the baby-pressure assholes tonight. If they expect me to talk that's what I'm going to say to them.)

[Barrett808]

2. "baby pressure" -- the worst

My mom gave up long ago, fortunately.

[stuntcat]

3. I'm gonna wear my "Extinction is Forever" button

I feel so passive/aggressive about it :blush: but whatever, it's MY life!

[Annces]

4. I can relate

YOu shouldn't have to put a lid on your own opinions just to please people. I sent my aunt and uncle (pro-hunting) a postcard saying End Sports Hunting, to as politely as I could let them know my stance, and because their Christmas letter jokingly talked about hunting. My aunt sent me a nice reply. My uncle said nothing.

I guess there have been culture clashes within families since time began.

[GliderGuider]

5. I'm going through a family divergence right now as well.

My father is a hard-core rationalist, a research biochemist who has lived his whole life by and for the Scientific Method. He is also utterly anti-religious -- to him any spiritual belief is indistinguishable from superstition. Fortunately he's open minded enough that my declaration of pantheism a couple of years ago was OK because Lovelock, Einstein and Hawking were all pantheists. And Deep Ecology is fine by him as well -- he understands the intrinsic rights of other creatures. He even gets the dualist Cartesian roots of our crisis and partly accepts the insufficiency of reductionism. But my recent, more overt spirituality is causing some unspoken stuff to hang in the air between us.

I think I feel more pressure to justify my change to him than he does to dissuade me from my woolly-minded mysticism, so I'll probably just politely skirt around the core of the topic. He is 85 after all, and I claim to be an adult as well, so there's not much point tilting at that windmill.

[Annces]

6. People feel safe

in their ideas. And I think a lot of people may have had open minds in their teens, but they don't change after that too much. I feel very sympathetic to mysticism, and science is just a tool, not the answer.

[Annces]

7. here is a penguin webcam in Antarctica

Sometimes the penguins are just inches from the camera.

http://www.martingrund.de/pinguine/pinguincam2.htm#2

[Barrett808]

8. Cool, thanks for posting! n/t