Video of the Next Oil Spill: Rare Penguins Blackened by Remote Oil Spill

Oil patches cover a northern rockhopper penguin on March 23, a week after a cargo vessel slammed into Nightingale Island in the South Atlantic, initiating a roughly 1,500-ton of fuel-oil spill, according to the U.K.-based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.



The island, part of the British territory of Tristan da Cunha, is home to 200,000 northern rockhopper penguins, half the world's population. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the bird as endangered, due to its mysteriously rapid decline in the past three decades.

Source: National Geographic News