Life guards are unfairly lampooned. Who hasn't seen the image of the know-nothing burly guy imperiously looking down from the guard chair with zinc-oxide slathered on their nose?

 But it turns out these are highly trained folks. They know first aid. They use a variety of flotation devices. Here in Chicago they wrangle dogs that are used to scare off gulls and protect water quality. And in Brazil, they are becoming penguin EMTs.

The Washington Post ran a long article on the weird image of penguins circulating with bikinis and life guards on Brazil's beaches. The lifeguard station on Copacabana beach is described as a triage station where injured birds are checked for broken bones and have their throats cleared. They even have to save penguins from well-meaning beach-goers who dump the flightless birds into ice buckets...

Stories of penguins washing up on warm Brazilian beaches have been coming in for the last few years. But the frequency of Argentina's Magellanic penguins waddling onto the beaches 2,000 miles away from their homes has increased to a level of significant concern. Over 1,000 of the tuxedoed birds have swum north towards the equator. When they show up on Copacabana, they are exhausted and emaciated.

What's the problem? We don't know.

South America's chilly western currents are finicky, with regular disturbances that have far reaching impacts on the continent. But climatologists are noticing increasing rates of warm El Niño and colder La Niña currents. And this year, the penguins are encountering unusually cold Benguela waters that would normally form a warm barrier to the birds' movement. Climate change is likely a factor, but this has not yet been proven.

The only thing for sure is that penguins are in peril.

Populations all over the world are shrinking. Some due to a loss of food resources due to overfishing. Some due to a loss of habitat and the ice they rely on to live and breed. Adelie and Emperor penguins, for example, rely on very small sliver of Antarctica where they can breed and brood chicks---frozen sea ice in an area smaller than L.A. As climate change advances, that ice is going to shrink and disappear leading to more tourist penguins visiting the beaches all over the world for a while...and then none.

In the meantime, United States is considering adding numerous penguin species to the Endangered Species Act's list of threatened and endangered species.

And maybe our lifeguards should start boning up on penguin anatomy...