The colony of emperor penguins that starred in March of the Penguins could become extinct by next century due to shrinking sea ice. The species as a whole has a better chance of survival, though that’s not the message of many media headlines.

Emperor penguins rely on sea ice both as a platform to breed on, and because krill – the penguins’ main food source – thrive by grazing algae that grow on the underside of the ice. When the ice shrank suddenly in the 1970s, for instance, half of the emperor penguins in the Adélie Land were wiped out.

The chances of sudden sea ice fluctuations happening again are higher as the climate warms, according to various scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Using these models to simulate the Adélie Land colony’s future, Stephanie Jenouvrier, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and colleagues report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the poor penguins have at least a one-in-three chance of being 95% wiped out by 2100.

“Unlike some other Antarctic bird species that have altered their life cycles, penguins don’t catch on so quickly,” Jenouvrier adds – so the chances of the penguins coping with melting ice by migrating or shifting breeding patterns, for instance, are slim.

Other emperor penguins may be more fortunate. Gerald Kooyman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego tells Science that many of Antarctica’s 400,000 or so emperor penguins live further south, where it’s colder. ‘Are emperor penguins as a species in trouble? I don’t think so,’ he says.

“[Emperor penguins] are to Antarctica what the polar bear is to the Arctic,” Rockefeller University’s Joel Cohen tells the BBC. “This study takes our knowledge, puts it together, gives us some insights, arouses concern and suggests that we ought to be understanding this situation a lot better."

Image courtesy of Samuel Blanc.