The king penguin throngs on Île aux Cochons in November 2019 were a fraction of their past size. By Eli KintischWhere on Earth, wondered Henri Weimerskirch, were all the penguins?
It was early 2017. Colleagues had sent the seabird ecologist aerial photos of Île aux Cochons, a barren volcanic island halfway between Madagascar and Antarctica that humans rarely visit.
The images revealed vast areas of bare rock that, just a few decades before, had been crowded with some 500,000 pairs of nesting king penguins and their chicks.
It appeared that the colony—the world’s largest king penguin aggregation and the second biggest colony of any of the 18 penguin species—had shrunk by 90%.