Pumas Massacred Thousands Of Penguins In A Park Created To Protect Them
In 2007, Magellanic penguins at Monte León National Park along the coastline of Argentine Patagonia were being slaughtered by a female puma.
She would devour some of the penguins while other kills were left to rot. Her three cubs also ate their fill, as there was more than enough to go around.
All in all, the feline family likely killed thousands of penguins throughout several nesting seasons. These kinds of attacks had not been known to occur before, so conservationists were appalled by the turn of events.
The park was created in 2004 as a way of protecting the large penguin colony. Wildlife officials put an end to the killings by taking down the pumas.
Now, recent research has revealed that this kind of penguin predation probably did happen in the past. It could explain why there used to be fewer penguin colonies on the mainland of South America.
That changed about a century ago with the rise of sheep farmers, the fur trade, and the whaling industry, which may have significantly reduced marine predators. These human activities may have led to an increase in mainland penguin populations.
In a new study, a team of researchers examined the importance of penguins in the diet of the puma family at Monte León.
The Magellanic penguins breed and nest in colonies on small islands offshore from the mainland coast in South America. These locations are generally free of land-based predators.
But in the past century, they have been nesting in large colonies with hundreds of thousands of individuals on the mainland of South America, such as those at Punta Tombo and Península Valdés in Argentina. As conditions improved for the species, they moved northward and settled in these zones.
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At Monte León, the penguins had been thriving until recent decades because of the lack of pumas in the area. Sheep farmers were some of the first settlers in coastal Argentine Patagonia, and they got rid of all potential predators, including foxes, pumas, and smaller wildcats, in the region to better protect their herds.
The removal of predators allowed the penguins to nest along the coast and grow their populations. However, the farmers quickly realized that the arid conditions of coastal Patagonia in Argentina were not ideal for sheep herding. By the 1990s, many of them vacated the area.
The government created national parks like Monte León to protect some of the penguin colonies. But this meant pumas and other predators were under protection as well and were no longer killed. So, some of them started feasting on penguins.
The diet of the puma family changed from relying on terrestrial food to one that depended almost entirely on penguins. The hunting of penguins could affect the species in the long term.
“Predation is particularly important when the colony is in the early stages of formation,” said Javier Ciancio, a marine biologist and ecologist with Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council.
“This could happen at any time on the continent, but after predation events, penguins may choose to nest elsewhere, in safer locations such as islands.”
The question of how to deal with penguin predation on the coast remains. Wildlife experts are uncertain if keeping pumas in the area or removing them will have a more positive impact.
The study was published in the Journal for Nature Conservation.
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