Endangered
Yellow-eyed Penguin
Megadyptes antipodes
The yellow-eyed penguin, known also as hoiho, is a penguin endemic to New Zealand.
Appearance
The yellow-eyed penguin (M. A. Antipodes) is most easily identified by the band of pale yellow feathers surrounding its eyes and encircling the back of its head. Its forehead, crown and the sides of its face are slate grey flecked with golden yellow. The foreneck and sides of the head are light brown.
It is the largest living penguin to breed on the mainland of New Zealand and the fourth or fifth heaviest living penguin by body mass.
It stands 62–79 centimetres (24–31 in) tall and weighs 3–8.5 kilograms (6.6–18.7 lb).
Published measurements include mass about 133.1.
Range and habitat
Even so, genetic analysis has since revealed that its range only expanded to include mainland New Zealand in the past 200 years. Yellow-eyed penguins expanded out of the subantarctic to replace New Zealand's endemic Waitaha penguin (M. A. Waitaha). Jeremy Austin, a member of the team that discovered the Waitaha penguin, said, "Our findings demonstrate that yellow-eyed penguins on mainland New Zealand are not a declining remnant of a previous abundant population, but came from the subantarctic relatively recently and replaced the extinct Waitaha penguin".
The species breeds along the eastern and south-eastern coastlines of the South Island of New Zealand, as well as Stewart Island, Auckland Islands, and Campbell Islands. On the New Zealand mainland, the species has experienced a significant decline over the past 20 years.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Around 90% of the yellow-eyed penguin's diet is made up of fish, chiefly demersal species that live near the seafloor, among them silversides (Argentina elongata), blue cod (Parapercis colias), red cod (Pseudophycis bachus), and opalfish (Hemerocoetes monopterygius). While initially thought that the birds would prey on jellyfish itself, deployments of camera loggers revealed that the penguins were going after juvenile fish and fish larvae associated with jellyfish.
Breeding penguins usually undertake two kinds of foraging trips: day trips where the birds leave at dawn and return in the evening ranging up to 25 km from their colonies, and shorter evening trips during that the birds are seldom away from their nest longer than four hours or range farther than 7 km. Yellow-eyed penguins are known to be an almost exclusive benthic forager that searches for prey along the seafloor.
In crisis
On the Otago Peninsula, numbers have dropped by 75% since the mid-1990s and population trends indicate the possibility of regional extinction from the peninsula in the next 20 to 40 years. It was first included on the list in 1988 when it was listed as threatened, and was changed to endangered in the year 2000. Data from the Department of Conservation showed that the northern population had collapsed by 80 percent since 2008, from 739 breeding pairs to just 143 in 2025.
Populations of yellow-eyed penguins are threatened by multiple factors. The northern population is declining as a result of recurring poor breeding seasons and ongoing high adult mortality.
Yellow-eyed Penguin is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Yellow-eyed Penguin, Wikidata item Q206654. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
