Injury, infection, and starvation threaten Aotearoa's penguins

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-05-01 04:00

Australia; New Zealand

Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

An analysis of 1300 wild penguin deaths across seven species shows the threats they face in Aotearoa. Studying a national catalogue of reported wildlife deaths from 1986 to 2020, researchers found the most common diagnosis, affecting a third of penguins, was emaciation. However, the main causes of death were infection or inflammatory disease, which killed over a third of penguins, followed by traumatic injury—the main killer of kororā. The study concludes that it's likely poor nutrition, trauma, and disease are interacting and contributing to the ill health and deaths of Aotearoa's penguins.

Journal/
conference: PLOS ONE

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Murdoch University, Massey University, Department of Conservation, Auckland Zoo

Funder: The research was funded by a partner scholarship between Auckland Zoo and Murdoch University, as part of the Conservation Medicine Residency program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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