The stars of March of the Penguins, Emperor Penguins, are poised to suffer extinction by the end of this century, say researchers.
We can blame the usual suspect--global warming--for melting too much ice in Antarctica. If significant reductions in global warming are not reached soon, the pattern of ice melt will shrink the penguins' habitat dangerously. It is estimated that one penguin colony under study would decline from 3,000 to 400 mating pairs.
It is not just that shrinking ice floes would leave the penguins nowhere to stand. The penguins' primary food source is krill that lives on the underside of the ice. As the ice melts, the krill decline and so do the many animals that eat it, including penguins.
Stories like this depressed me before I had children. But now that I do, I project a future in which my children's children's live in a penguin-less world, and that leaves me even sadder. Because it's not just penguins. By some estimates 50% of all species will be near-extinct or extinct by the turn of the next century.
If my kids live to be 80, they'll be here until 2085 or so. And no one is suggesting that the great mass extinction will necessarily stop at 2100. Without knowing more about A) what species actually exist now--some say species have already probably hit extinction without ever having been discovered and B) what exactly each species' overall effect on the Earth's ecosystem is, we can't say human beings won't be on the critically endangered list by the time our babies are sending their babies off to college.
I guess we should all swap out our cars for bicycles.
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