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Zookeepers are counting their losses after the tragic deaths of around 50 of their 69 penguins due to an avian malaria outbreak.Dozens of Humboldt penguins at Dudley Zoo have died having contracted the disease, leading to an outpouring of sympathy and sadness from zoo fans. Similar to human malaria, avian malaria is a parasitic disease transmitted through the bite of infected mosquitoes. It cannot be passed on to humans or other animal species, but penguins are particularly susceptible to it as they do not have natural immunity to the disease. This is a completely separate disease to avian flu, which...

A swarm of bees killed more than 60 penguins on a beach near Cape Town, South Africa, officials said Saturday. South Africa National Parks said in a Facebook post that 63 African penguins were found dead at Boulders Beach, noting the deaths “occurred suddenly some time between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning.” The penguins were transported to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) to conduct post mortems, which found that all of the penguins had “multiple bee stings.” Officials also found numerous dead bees at the site of the incident. Officials will continue to monitor...

Ancient New Zealand has been home to an incredible array of absurdly large birds. This has included a waist-high parrot, nicknamed Squawk-zilla (Heracles inexpectatus) – the largest parrot ever known on Earth, possibly hunting for flesh around 20 million years ago. Two-meter-high flightless Moa also made their home there, along with their predator, Haast's Eagles (Hieraaetus moorei), with a monstrous 3-meter wingspan, around 2 million years ago. Now researchers have added a new giant penguin to this gloriously super-sized menagerie – one discovered by a lucky group of school kids back in 2006. "It's sort of surreal to know that...

Nearly all of the world’s emperor penguin colonies may be pushed to the brink of extinction by 2100, a new study has found, as the United States moves to list them as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.If climate change continues at its current rate, more than 98 percent of emperor penguin colonies are expected to become quasi-extinct by the turn of the century, a group of global researchers wrote in the journal Global Change Biology on Tuesday. The scientists’ near-term predictions were equally grim: They estimated at least two-thirds of colonies would be quasi-extinct by 2050.

Dapper - wholesome post - Imgur

The gay penguins strike again. A pair of two male African penguins at a Dutch zoo, who made international headlines last year when they stole an egg from a heterosexual couple, have now stolen the nest of a lesbian duo, DierenPark Amsersfoort said in a Facebook post. Zookeeper Sander Drost told Dutch News that the gay couple is taking turns sitting on the eggs to keep them warm. But, Drost said, the eggs are likely unfertilized and will not hatch because they were laid by a lesbian penguin couple.

Penguins at Singapore zoo are making the most of the partial virus lockdown, being given the run of the empty complex and revelling in the chance to do some exploring. With the zoo closed to the public as the country battles a worsening virus outbreak, the African penguins had little in the way of stimulation without passers-by stopping to admire them. So their keepers began taking them on outings around the complex, nudging the pint-sized explorers to check out the area around their exhibit and the children's playground.

An adorable penguin was caught on camera checking in on its neighbours at an empty aquarium during the coronavirus lockdown. The footage was recorded at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois, which currently remains closed due to the outbreak. The inquisitive rockhopper penguin called Wellington, who is one of the oldest at the attraction, was allowed to roam around the other exhibits before stopping to greet a pod of beluga whales.

Gay penguins Skipper and Ping have been given the chance to be parents after taking in an abandoned egg at the Berlin Zoo. The pair, two male emperor penguins — both 10 years old — had longed to be dads for quite some time as they showed “immediate baby fever” as soon as they arrived to the zoo in April

Anyone visiting the Gdansk Zoo in Poland reportedly now has the opportunity to observe a most uncommon creature – an albino penguin. The rare bird, who came into the world in December, is unlike many others in its breed in that it does not bear the traditional "tuxedo" black markings associated with the animal, according to The Associated Press. Its atypical look reportedly would’ve proved to be problematic had it lived in the wild because others penguins would not have accepted it and the likelihood of its survival would’ve been low.The baby penguin "would have become the very first to be attacked...

It would appear then that slightly increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature stasis over 20 years have done absolutely nothing to threaten the Penguins In 2008, historian Meredith Hooper published her book: “The Ferocious Summer. Adélie Penguins and the warming of Antarctica.” (Greystone Books, Vancouver, British Columbia.) We are told that “This book is a fascinating and alarming report from the frontlines of global warming” and not surprisingly we find the following message on the book’s front cover from serial alarmist Dr. David Suzuki: “Like canaries in a coal mine, penguins present an undeniable and urgent warning of...

You can give your cat the flu. You can also pass pneumonia to a chimpanzee or tuberculosis to a bird. This kind of human-to-animal disease transmission, known as reverse zoonosis, has been seen on every continent except one: Antarctica. Now, human-linked pathogens in bird poop reveal, for the first time, that even animals on this isolated, ice-bound landmass can pick up a bug from tourists or visiting scientists. This newly identified infection route could have devastating consequences for Antarctic bird colonies, including population collapse and even extinction. “[We’re] obsessed about the potential for novel diseases to jump from wildlife to...

Retired bricklayer and part time fisherman Joao Pereira de Souza, 71, from an island village just outside Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, discovered the tiny penguin languishing on rocks in 2011. He was astonished when, just a few months later, the penguin returned to the island where he recognised Mr de Souza and returned home with him. Now, Dindim spends eight months of the year with Mr de Souza and spends the rest of his time breeding off the coast of Argentina and Chile.

A penguin named Dindim swims around 8000 kilometres every year to visit his best friend, a fisherman who saved his life.Rio de Janeiro resident Joao Pereira de Souza did not expect to make a lifelong friend when he rescued a struggling, oil-slicked penguin from the beach years ago – but that’s exactly what happened. Now Dindim swims thousands of miles to spend eight months out of the year with his buddy, renewing everyone’s faith in the deep connection we share with animals. In 2011 Pereira de Souza discovered a South American Magellanic penguin on the beach near his home. The...

OSLO, (Reuters) - Global warming will cut Antarctica's 600,000-strong emperor penguin population by at least a fifth by 2100 as the sea ice on which the birds breed becomes less secure, a study said on Sunday. The report urged governments to list the birds as endangered, even though populations in 45 known colonies were likely to rise slightly by 2050 before declining. Such a listing could impose restrictions on tourism and fishing companies. The study is the first to project the long-term outlook for Antarctica's largest penguins, which can grow 1.2 meters (four ft) tall, seeking to fill a gap...

All but two Adelie penguin chicks have starved to death in their east Antarctic colony, in a breeding season described as "catastrophic" by experts. It was caused by unusually high amounts of ice late in the season, meaning adults had to travel further for food. It is the second bad season in five years after no chicks survived in 2015.

It turns out that these elusive seabirds had lived on the islands undetected for at least 2,800 years, according to new, unpublished research presented Dec. 11 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C. It all started when a group of researchers spent 10 months doing what they thought was a pan-Antarctic survey of Adélie penguins by looking through every single cloud-free satellite image that they had of the southern continent. "We thought that we knew where all the [Adélie] penguin colonies were," said Heather Lynch, an ecologist at the Stony Brook University, during the news conference.That is, until...

At last: Game over. Series over. For the first time in 20 years, a D.C. team in one of the four major pro sports is moving on to the conference finals. Let that sink in. The Capitals were the last to do it, in 1998, when they eliminated the Senators in five games in the second round and then ousted the Sabres in six games to clinch their only Eastern Conference title in franchise history. With Evgeny Kuznetsov’s breakaway goal less than six minutes into overtime, Washington improved to 2-9 all-time in postseason series against the Penguins; the Capitals’ only...

A favorite technique of the propagandists of the Global Warming scare is to find cute and cuddly creatures that they can claim are “threatened” by global warming. For years, an iconic picture of a polar bear on an ice floe was used to frighten children into clutching their stuffed teddy bears and demanding Mommy and Daddy act to save them. But the bloom started coming off that rose when a scientist who had made population estimates that allowed the bears to be classified as threatened admitted that the estimates were: “A guess to satisfy public demand” but wrapped in...

A thriving "hotspot" of 1.5 million Adelie penguins, a species fast declining in parts of the world, has been discovered on remote islands off the Antarctic Peninsula, surprised scientists said Friday. The first bird census of the Danger Islands unearthed over 750,000 Adelie breeding pairs, more than the rest of the area combined, the team reported in the journal Scientific Reports. {snip} When the Landsat data originally suggested the presence of hundreds of thousands of penguins on the islands, she thought it "was a mistake". "We were surprised to find so many penguins on these islands, especially because some of...