Authorities said that over the past 10 days, more than 2,000 dead penguins had unexplainably washed up on the eastern shores of Uruguay.
The cause of their deaths is unknown, but according to reports, it does not appear that they were affected by avian influenza. The majority of the deceased Magellanic penguins were young birds that perished in the Atlantic Ocean and were carried by currents to Uruguay’s coastlines, as stated by Carmen Leizagoyen, director of the Department of Fauna in the Environment Ministry. This is referred to as waterborne mortality. She noted that 90% of the samples are juvenile animals that arrived without fat reserves and empty-handed, and all avian influenza tests conducted on the samples returned negative results.
According to NDTV, in the southern hemisphere winter, Magellanic penguins fly north in search of food and warmer seas, nesting in southern Argentina and even reaching the shores of the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo. “It is normal for some percentage to pass away, but not in these numbers,” added Leizagoyen, mentioning a similar occurrence that happened in Brazil last year for unknown reasons.
In that incident, over 500 dead penguins were discovered along six miles (10 kilometers) of the Atlantic coast, as reported by Hector Caymaris, director of the Laguna de Rocha protected area. Environmentalists have linked the rising mortality of Magellanic penguins to the main factors of overfishing and illegal fishing, according to their assessments.
Animals without enough food began to appear in the 1990s and 2000s, as Richard Tesore of the NGO SOS Marine Wildlife Rescue explained, pointing out that the resource is being overused.
Additionally, he suggested that a subtropical cyclone in the Atlantic that impacted southeast Brazil in mid-July might have contributed to the deaths of the weakest animals due to the unfavorably chilly weather. Recently, Tesore reported seeing dead petrels, albatrosses, seagulls, sea turtles, and sea lions in addition to penguins on the beaches of Maldonado, a department east of the nation’s capital Montevideo. In a related incident along the Texas Gulf Coast, thousands of dead fish were discovered washed up on the strand at Quintana Beach County Park last month, which US authorities have described as “a low dissolved oxygen event” in warm water.
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