However, after living in obscurity on the Danger Islands off the Antarctic peninsula, a “supercolony” of Adelie penguins has been discovered by scientists. As a result, only two chicks out of 18,000 pairs of Adelie penguins in east Antarctica survived the early 2017 breeding season. “Until recently, the Danger Islands weren’t known to be an important penguin habitat,” she said. What this revealed was that 751,527 pairs of Adelie penguins live on the islands. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, also found the population of Adelie penguins on the Danger Islands has been stable since 1959, despite the effects of climate change.

Source: National Post March 03, 2018 20:37 UTC