This is a list of Sphenisciformes species by global population. While numbers are estimates, they have been made by the experts in their fields.

Sphenisciformes Penguins (order Sphenisciformes , family Spheniscidae ) are a group of aquatic flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere: only one species, the Galápagos penguin, is found north of the Equator. Highly adapt ...

(from the Latin for ''"wedge-shaped"'') is the taxonomic order to which the penguins belong.

BirdLife International BirdLife International is a global partnership of non-governmental organizations that strives to conserve birds and their habitats. BirdLife International's priorities include preventing extinction of bird species, identifying and safeguarding ...

has assessed 18 species. 16 (89% of total species) have had their population estimated: those missing are the

king King is the title given to a male monarch in a variety of contexts. The female equivalent is queen regnant, queen, which title is also given to the queen consort, consort of a king. *In the context of prehistory, antiquity and contempora ...

and

little penguin The little penguin (''Eudyptula minor'') is a species of penguin from New Zealand. They are commonly known as little blue penguins or blue penguins owing to their slate-blue plumage and are also known by their Māori name . The Australian li ...

s, both of which have been assessed as being of

least concern A least-concern species is a species that has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as evaluated as not being a focus of species conservation because the specific species is still plentiful in the wild. ...

. A variety of methods are used for counting penguins, and April 2012 saw their first census from space, when imagery from Ikonos, QuickBird-2, and

WorldView-2 ''WorldView-2'' (WV 2) is a commercial Earth observation satellite owned by DigitalGlobe. ''WorldView-2'' provides commercially available panchromatic imagery of resolution, and eight-band multispectral imagery with resolution. It was launch ...

satellites were used to count

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest cont ...

emperors An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife ( empress consort), mother (empr ...

. This is a similar technique to that used by the

UNHCR The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integrat ...

to count humans in

Somalia Somalia, , Osmanya script: 𐒈𐒝𐒑𐒛𐒐𐒘𐒕𐒖; ar, الصومال, aṣ-Ṣūmāl officially the Federal Republic of SomaliaThe ''Federal Republic of Somalia'' is the country's name per Article 1 of thProvisional Constitut ...

. Most maritime surveys use

strip transect Strip or Stripping may refer to: Places * Aouzou Strip, a strip of land following the northern border of Chad that had been claimed and occupied by Libya * Caprivi Strip, narrow strip of land extending from the Okavango Region of Namibia to ...

and

distance sampling Distance sampling is a widely used group of closely related methods for estimating the density and/or abundance of populations. The main methods are based on line transects or point transects.Buckland, S. T., Anderson, D. R., Burnham, K. P. and La ...

to measure density; this is then extrapolated over the animal's range. The Galapagos has been counted annually since 1961 by the Galápagos National Park Service. By land and sea, they carry out a full census in ten areas and partial census in four. The 2012 observation of 721 birds showed that levels have remained the same over recent years, and the current full estimate need not be changed. For more information on how these estimates were ascertained, see Wikipedia's articles on

population biology The term population biology has been used with different meanings. In 1971 Edward O. Wilson ''et al''. used the term in the sense of applying mathematical models to population genetics, community ecology, and population dynamics. Alan Hastings u ...

and

population ecology Population ecology is a sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment, such as birth and death rates, and by immigration and emigration. The discipline is import ...

. Species that can no longer be included in a list of this nature include the Waitaha penguin, the last of which is believed to have perished between 1300 and 1500 AD (soon after the Polynesian arrival to New Zealand), and the Chatham penguin, which is only known through

subfossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

s but may have been kept in captivity sometime between 1867 and 1872.A.J.D. Tennyson and P.R. Millener (1994)
Bird extinctions and fossil bones from Mangere Island, Chatham Islands
''Notornis'' (Supplement) 41, 165–178. Adélies and emperors nest on Antarctica and feed on broken pack ice;

global warming In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to ...

's effect on the latter may affect their numbers, and the chinstraps and gentoos, which both feed in open waters, have been making inroads into the Adélie and emperors' formerly ice-packed range. The gentoos have thus seen 7500% population growth since 1974, and the chinstraps 2700%.

Species by global population

References

{{Birds by population

Birds Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweigh ...

Species by global population

See also

References