It’s a Race to Save the Humboldt Penguin

In the early 1990s, biologist Alejandro Simeone was walking the beaches of Viña del Mar, in central Chile, when he encountered a scene that would end up defining his career: dead Humboldt Penguins, their flippers and feet abraded, their lungs filled with foam. They had drowned in fishing nets. 

These were not isolated findings. Simeone and his team began to patrol the shore regularly. “What we saw were dozens, hundreds of dead bodies on the beaches,” says Simeone, now Chile’s leading scientist dedicated to studying the species at the One Health Institute of the Faculty of Life Sciences at Universidad Andrés Bello. They documented their findings in a 1999 study, incorporating the accounts of fishermen from nearby coves. Around 120 penguins per year were dying in gill nets on this stretch of coast, they reported, but the scale of the problem extended far beyond what their research could capture. It stretched all along the coasts of Chile and Peru, where Humboldt Penguins breed on islands and rocky shores and feed on fish in coastal waters. 

Since then threats to the species have increased and accelerated. Along with fishing bycatch, climate change and avian flu are also taking a toll. The cumulative impact has been devastating. By one estimate, the global population in 2020 was around 23,800 adult birds. But a census published by Simeone and his team in March found that, across the 11 islands in north-central Chile that hold 90 percent of the country’s breeding population of Humboldt Penguins, the number of active nests plunged to 910 from 2,443 in just four years—a 63 percent decrease. In some colonies farther north, the blow was even more devastating: Up to 90 percent of nests had vanished. 

At the same time, the species is finally receiving unprecedented attention after decades of inaction. Scientists, conservationists, and fishers are testing new ways to reduce its mortality and protect the places it depends on. In 2025, Chile reclassified the species as endangered due primarily to gill net bycatch and overfishing of its prey. When a new government withdrew its predecessor’s proposal to make the Humboldt Penguin a “Natural Monument”—a designation that would create additional protections—the public responded with a campaign called “It’s More Than a Penguin” that aims to restore the label. Conservationists are also pushing the International Union for Conservation of Nature to upgrade the species’ global status from vulnerable to endangered.

The Humboldt Penguin is endemic to the cold ocean current that bears its name, which runs along the southeastern Pacific from northern Peru to the Chilean island of Chiloé. Standing roughly two feet tall and weighing around 8 to 10 pounds, the species is distinguished by a bare pink patch on its face and a horseshoe-shaped black band crossing its white chest. The Humboldt Current has long offered the birds a refuge of cold, nutrient-rich waters teeming with fish such as anchovies and sardines. But the species has also faced threats from human activity for more than a century, from the guano extraction that stripped away their nesting habitat in the mid-1800s to the industrial fishing that depleted their food supply a century later. While the nature of the dangers has evolved, Simeone says, things are getting worse for the birds. “In the last 5 to 10 years, we’re seeing that decline actually accelerating.”

Bycatch is the most acute hazard facing the birds, experts say. GPS tracking by Simeone’s team shows that penguins share their feeding grounds with fishing boats. In 2023 alone, small-scale fishers inadvertently caught an estimated 4,067 Humboldt Penguins across Chile and Peru, according to a study led by the conservation nonprofits Pro Delphinus and Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge. Most of that bycatch happened in gill nets, which trap fish that try to swim through their mesh. “We’re talking about a net up to a kilometer long that is set in the water and left there all night,” says Verónica López, coordinator of the Binational Humboldt Penguin Conservation Project at Oikonos. Around 20 percent of the bycatch in the study came from purse-seine nets that fishers draw closed to encircle whole schools of sardines and anchovies, the same fish that the birds rely on for food. 

More recently, new perils have emerged. In 2023 an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza converged with an intense El Niño event that produced some of the highest ocean temperatures on record for the region. El Niño events weaken the Humboldt Current, and the resulting warmer waters can have a major impact on Humboldt Penguin breeding colonies; Simeone and his colleagues found that, during one such event in the late ‘90s, the number of breeding pairs at a colony in central Chile was 55 to 85 percent below average, their nesting was delayed, and unusually heavy rains flooded nests.

To date, a shortage of research and monitoring has made it difficult to know how big a dent rising ocean temperatures and avian flu are making in Humboldt Penguin populations, but that could be changing. A new framework is bringing greater coordination to efforts to save the species. In 2025 Chile and Peru began conducting the first standardized binational census to establish how many Humboldt Penguins survive across the species’ full range and to lay the groundwork for lasting cooperation between the two countries, says Ignacio Díaz, head of the Protected Areas Management Department at Chile’s National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) and a member of the plan’s Technical Secretariat.

Audubon has also advanced policy efforts. In 2025, the organization supported the Action Plan for the Conservation of Seabirds, part of Chile’s National Bird Conservation Strategy that seeks to coordinate protection measures across the full life cycle of these species. For Jorge Tomasevic, a Chile-based conservation manager for strategic partnerships at Audubon Latin America and Caribbean, the central challenge is that Humboldt Penguins depend on two worlds: Their conservation, he explains, requires both protecting the sites on land where they breed and ensuring they find sufficient food in the ocean.

That coordination is now beginning to translate into concrete interventions. At sea, Oikonos has launched a pilot project with artisanal fishers in the Coquimbo region to install specialized LED lights on gill nets. The technology has already shown promise for preventing gill net bycatch of seabirds, sea turtles, and dolphins. “The animals will see the light and be able to identify that there’s a wall there. Many will be able to avoid the net,” says Patricia Zárate, head of the Fisheries Assessment Department at the Instituto de Fomento Pesquero, Chile’s national fisheries research institute. 

Simón Zepeda, a fisher from Guanaqueros who helps collect data aboard the vessels, says it is still too early to measure the lights’ effectiveness. So far, only five trips have been completed under the pilot project, and there was no penguin bycatch. For Zepeda, fishers’ participation is essential, but winning the trust of his peers has not been easy. “It’s been hard to get them to understand how science works, how data works,” he says. “They tell me: ‘Hey, you asked me the same thing last week.’”

But the ocean is only one front. On land, Oikonos and Chile’s Ministry of the Environment are creating a National Seabird Stranding Network, a community science effort to guide conservation by tracking bird deaths and their causes. “We need to understand how many animals are actually dying,” López says. “With citizen science, instead of having one set of eyes on the beach, we’ll have hundreds of people walking the beaches and seeing what they find.”

Meanwhile, in places where the Humboldt Penguin nests, the organization Island Conservation and CONAF have eradicated invasive species, mainly rats and rabbits. Thanks to those efforts, the Humboldt Penguin National Reserve, part of the Humboldt Archipelago, one of the places where the largest population of the species was concentrated until recently, in 2018 became the first protected area of its kind to be declared free of invasive vertebrates. 

For Simeone, those efforts reflect a broader change. Twenty years ago, whenever he mentioned working with Humboldt Penguins, he was asked: “Penguins? Do you work in Antarctica?” Few people in the general public imagined these birds lived along the coasts of Chile and Peru. Today awareness has grown, along with data, surveys, technology, and a network of people working to protect them. “There is hope,” says Simeone, “as long as all that awareness translates into changes.”