Everyone loves penguins, so every journalist loves stories about penguins. Today’s is about Dee Boersma.

For 30 years she’s been working with the critters and she’s just written a new article in the journal BioScience warning that penguins are “sentinels”, and these “canaries in the mine” are telling danger is present. As ever, the danger is sourced to us (press release, paper pdf).

Climate change, fishing and pollutions are all in the frame.

“Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world,” says Boersma, a biologist at the University of Washington (UW press release). “The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins.”

Her paper notes that penguin numbers at Punta Tombo in Argentina have halved since the late 60s and Galapagos penguins have fallen to a quarter of their 70s numbers.

“What happens to penguins, a few years down the road can happen to a lot of other species and possibly humans,” penguin expert Susie Ellis, who is now a director of the International Rhino Foundation, told AP.

Boersma’s article concludes with a question:

We are changing the world, the course of evolution, and the species with which we share the planet. Can people change to allow other species to persist and coexist? That is the real question: can we, and will we, manage ourselves?

Of course after 30 years there are some great stories to tell. The Seattle PI reports that one particular penguin Boersma studied took a particular fancy to her. “He would come knock on our door with his bill. He would follow us when we went to work, and we’d say, ‘Go home, save your fat!’”

Image: NOAA