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The biggest colony of king penguins on the planet has collapsed, with nearly 90 per cent of the population vanishing since the 1980s, ecologists said.

The colony was first discovered in the Sixties 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, in which 88 per cent of the colony appears to have vanished.

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Although nobody has set foot on the island since 1982, photographs taken from a helicopter during a recent flyover show that there could be just 60,000 breeding pairs left, and scientists fear the decline will continue.

Photo by CNRS/IPEV/CSM/CELINE LE BOHEC via AFP/Getty Images

“It is completely unexpected, and particularly significant since this colony represented nearly one third of the king penguins in the world,” said research leader Dr. Henri Weimers-kirch, an ecologist at the Centre for -Biological Studies in Chize, France.