Paris — A thriving "hot-spot" of 1.5-million Adélie penguins, a species fast declining in parts of the world, has been discovered on remote islands off the Antarctic Peninsula, scientists said on Friday. The first bird census of the Danger Islands revealed more than 750,000 Adélie breeding pairs, more than the rest of the area combined, the team reported in the journal Scientific Reports. The group of nine rocky islands, which lie off the northern tip nearest South America, in the north-west Weddell Sea, housed the third-and fourth-largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world, they found. "It is certainly surprising and it has real consequences for how we manage this region," study co-author Heather Lynch of Stony Brook University told AFP. Just 160km away on the west of the peninsula — a thin limb jutting out of West Antarctica — Adélie numbers have dropped about 70% in recent decades due to sea ice melt blamed on global warming. "One of the ways in which this is good news is that ...
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