Emperor penguins on extinction road

Melting sea ice and overfishing have triggered a dangerously rapid decline in penguin populations on the Antarctic peninsula.

The gentoo, chinstrap and adélie – along with the emperor, the largest penguin species in the world – are now struggling to survive as melting sea ice destroys nesting sites and reduces vital food sources, such as krill.

Warmer temperatures are forcing penguins to raise their young on increasingly thinner and more precarious ice floes, while stronger winds mean many eggs and chicks are being blown away from their parents before they are able to survive on their own.

Emperor penguins, which breed during the harsh Antarctic winter, are likely to see their numbers plummet by 95% by 2100.

Chilling prognosis for Antarctic penguins

The Antarctic peninsula is warming five times faster than the average rate of global warming, the WWF warns, and the vast Southern Ocean has warmed all the way down to a depth of 3,000m.

A penguin species made famous by Hollywood is heading towards extinction, scientists have warned.

Emperor penguins could be on the verge of being wiped out before the end of the century, according to researchers in America.

The species, immortalised in the 2005 film March of the Penguins - which followed their trek across Antarctic ice - is under threat because of climate change.

If rising temperatures continue to melt sea ice at current rates, the population size of a large emperor penguin colony in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, will shrink from 3,000 to only 400 breeding pairs, a paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) claims.

The grim predictions were based on evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Biologist Stephanie Jenouvrier, from WHOI, said: "If the future behaves anything like the IPCC models predict, the Terre Adelie population will decline, probably dramatically."

Co-author Hal Caswell added: "The key to the analysis was deciding to focus not on average climate conditions, but on fluctuations that occasionally reduce the amount of available sea ice. This analysis focuses on a single population because of the excellent data available for it.

"But patterns of climate change and sea ice in the Antarctic are an area of intense research interest now. It remains to be seen how these changes will affect the entire species throughout Antarctica."

The paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, used mathematical models to predict the effect on penguins of climate change and the resulting loss of sea ice.

Sea ice plays a critical role in the Antarctic ecosystem - not only as a platform for penguins to breed and feed - but as a grazing ground for krill, tiny crustaceans that thrive on algae on the underside of the ice. Krill, in turn, are a food source for fish, seals, whales, and penguins.