On a beach in Patagonia, 40,000 pairs of Magellanic penguins have been running their annual breeding operation like they own the place. Then the pumas came back, looked around, and treated it like a seasonal pop-up buffet.
A new study tracking pumas in Argentina’s Monte León National Park suggests this penguin-heavy diet is doing something else, too. It’s making one of the most famously solitary big cats tolerate each other way more than expected, at least near the colony.
This all comes with a backstory. Ranchers pushed pumas out of parts of Patagonia in the 20th century. Monte León became a national park in 2004, hunting pressure dropped, and pumas began reestablishing themselves. During their absence, penguins that usually stick to offshore islands built a massive mainland breeding colony. Researchers soon started finding penguin remains in puma scat.
A Penguin Buffet Is Reshaping Life for Patagonia’s Pumas
“We thought it was just a couple of individuals that were doing this,” study co-author Mitchell Serota told Live Science. “But when we got there…we noticed a ton of puma detections near the penguin colony.”
To figure out what was going on, the team used camera traps and GPS collars on 14 adult pumas across multiple field seasons from 2019 to 2023. Nine of those cats hunted penguins; five didn’t. The penguin-hunters tightened their range around the colony during breeding season, then expanded their roaming to roughly double when the penguins headed back offshore.
Then came the social twist. The researchers documented 254 encounters between penguin-eating pumas, compared with just four between pumas that weren’t eating penguins. Most of these meetups happened within about a kilometer of the colony. The colony offers enough food that the cats don’t seem as bothered by each other’s presence.
National Geographic summed it up bluntly through a source close to the work. “In other words, penguin-eating pumas were quite tolerant of the presence of one another,” says Donadio.
This isn’t some cute nature anecdote where everyone learns to share. It’s a real management problem with two native species colliding inside a human-redesigned landscape. As Juan Ignacio Zanon Martinez wrote to Live Science, conservation plans work best when they’re built around how ecosystems function now, not how we assume they worked before.
Monte León didn’t resurrect an old Patagonia. It got a new one, where penguin season doubles as puma social hour.
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