Penguins are one of my favorite animals. I’m going to go ahead and guess penguins are one of your favorite animals, too. I doubt this is controversial. So we should all be sad to hear that the northern rockhopper is in extreme danger of going extinct. No one is exactly sure why, either.

MSNBC.com reports that northern rockhopper numbers have dropped 90 percent over the past 50 years. From the article:

The population of northern rockhopper penguins once reached into the millions, but now the largest colonies are estimated at between 32,000 to 65,000 pairs on Gough Island, and 40,000 to 50,000 pairs on Tristan da Cunha Island, according to a study in the journal Bird Conservation International.

This decline is a equivalent, says the lead author of the study, ” to losing 100 birds every day for the last 50 years,” and there’s no good way to explain how that’s happened. The researchers hope to figure out the explanation quickly in order to be able to actually do something about this issue.

The article also notes other penguin populations have been dwindling:

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service last December proposed listing the African penguin as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and five others as threatened: the yellow-eyed penguin, the white-flippered penguin, the Fiordland crested penguin and the erect-crested penguin, all from New Zealand; as well as the Humboldt penguin of Chile and Peru.

takepart with Conservation International to learn more about ensuring species survival.