Phillip Island is home to Australia's largest colony of little penguins, with an impressive 40,000 breeding penguins found on the Summerland Peninsula. The little penguin is not only the smallest of all penguins weighing around 1kg but also the only penguin with blue and white feathers.

Little penguins are top ocean predators, playing an important role in the marine ecosystem food web, and a valuable indicator species with changes in their population alerting us to changes in ocean health, such impacts to prey they eat.

Given little penguins live both at sea and on land, it is critically important for marine scientists to better understand the implications of marine and terrestrial threats to little penguins including commercial fishing operations, ingestion and entanglement of plastics and marine debris, oil spills, climate change, introduced predators, habitat destruction and invasive weeds in order to protect them.