The world's largest colony of king penguins has collapsed, with nearly 90 per cent of the population vanishing since the 1980s, ecologists have found.

The huge population was discovered in the 1960s on Ile aux Cochons, also known as Pig Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and Antarctica.

At its peak it contained two million birds and 500,000 breeding pairs, but new satellite images have shown an empty landscape, from which 88 per cent of the colony appears to have vanished.

Although nobody has set foot on the island since 1982, photographs taken from a helicopter during a recent fly-over also confirm that the colony’s penguin population has plummeted.

It means there could be just 60,000 breeding pairs left, and scientists fear the decline will continue.