MONTEVIDEO, Paraguay: In the past ten days, over 2,000 penguins have been found dead on the coast of eastern Uruguay, according to authorities.
The cause does not seem to be avian influenza, but it is still unknown.
According to Carmen Leizagoyen, Director of the Department of Flora in the Environment Ministry, the majority of the Magellanic penguins died in the Atlantic Ocean and were carried by currents to Uruguayan coastlines.
“This is water-related death. She stressed that all samples tested negative for avian influenza and that 90% of the animals were young specimens who arrived without fat reserves and with empty stomachs”.
In southern Argentina, Magellanic penguins lay their eggs. They move north during the southern hemisphere winter in search of food and warmer waters, even as far as the coast of the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo.
“It is normal for some percentage to die, but not these numbers,” Ms. Leizagoyen remarked, saying that the same die-off happened last year in Brazil for unknown causes. Over 500 dead penguins were found along six miles (10 kilometers) of the Atlantic coast, according to Hector Caymaris, head of the Laguna de Rocha protected area, who spoke to AFP.
Environmentalists blame overfishing and illicit fishing for the rise in the deaths of Magellanic penguins. “We started to notice animals lacking in food in the 1990s and 2000s. Richard Tesore of the NGO SOS Marine Wildlife Rescue told AFP that the resource is overexploited. He said the weakest animals most likely died from the bad weather caused by an Atlantic subtropical storm that struck southeast Brazil in mid-July.
On the beaches of Maldonado, a department east of the nation’s capital Montevideo, Tesore claimed to have recently discovered dead albatrosses, petrels, seagulls, sea lions, and sea turtles, in addition to penguins.
