Iconic penguin colony sees “population collapse” driven by climate change, study finds

Updated on: October 7, 2026 / 12:24 PM EDT / CBS/AFP

A remote island near Antarctica is no longer home to the world's largest penguin colony as climate-driven changes to ocean food chains likely devastated its once-thriving inhabitants and caused a "population collapse," researchers said Wednesday.

Drone and satellite images showed that the volcanic island of Zavodovski lost more than 680,000 — or nearly two-thirds — of its chinstrap penguins between 2011 and 2025, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

"That's a very rapid loss," Norman Ratcliffe, the lead author of the BAS study published in the journal Current Biology, told AFP.

The study's findings raise concerns that chinstrap populations across the South Sandwich Islands, which include Zavodovski and are home to 38% of the species, have fallen.

The scientists, who released video of their research, suggest that the "alarming declines" should lead to chinstrap penguins being redesignated as "endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

This would be a sharp downgrade from their "least concern" classification, which means they are not currently threatened with extinction.

Surveys in 2011 had concluded that chinstrap populations across the South Sandwich Islands were stable.

But their number on Zavodovski…

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/world/