Arctic Animals in Danger

Two more Antarctic animals are now classified as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species– the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal. 

In a press release on April 9th, the IUCN reported that the emperor penguin has been moved from Near Threatened to Endangered, and the Antarctic fur seal has been moved from Least Concern to  Endangered. 

The IUCN Red List is the “world's most comprehensive information source on the extinction risk of animals, fungi and plants.” They separate all evaluated species with enough data and organise them into groups based on multiple points of criteria, such as population size and reduction, geographical location, and an extinction probability analysis. Least Concern and Near Threatened are the bottom two classifications, and it’s concerning to see a large decline in population numbers of these species in such a short period of time.

According to the press release, the emperor penguin’s classification change was“ based on projections that its population will halve by the 2080s. Satellite images indicate a loss of around 10% of the population between 2009 and 2018 alone, equating to more than 20,000 adult penguins.” 

Much of the population reduction is due to a decline in sea ice attached to the coast, the sea floor, or a grounded iceberg. Emperor penguins use this ice as a habitat for their chicks before their chicks can swim. Warmer temperatures have led to the ice breaking more easily, leading to “observed tragedies – such as the collapse of a breeding colony into the sea before the chicks can swim.”

The fur seal was moved in the classification system because “its population has decreased by more than 50 per cent from an estimated 2,187,000 mature seals in 1999 to 944,000 in 2025.”

This rapid decline in population is due to warmer sea temperatures, as krill, their main source of food, leave the area in search of colder waters. This leaves less krill for the seals to eat, having shown to significantly reduce the survival rate for pups in their first year. “Other threats, such as predation by killer whales and leopard seals and competition with recovering baleen whale populations targeting the same krill, are potentially also impacting this declining population.”

Not only are these dramatic population declines a warning about the general health of the Earth, it also give insight into the health of the Antarctic region. 

The Antarctic has 70% of Earth’s freshwater and acts as a heat reflector that regulates temperatures. Antarctica also stabilizes the currents, tides, weather patterns, and sea levels. 

The loss of Antarctica could mean the loss of life on the coastlines of the world, the loss of the largest CO₂ absorber in the world, and the loss of thousands of species that live only in Antarctica.