Genomic data from Yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes antipodes)

The Yellow-eyed penguin (hoiho in Māori) is native to New Zealand. It breeds along the eastern and south-eastern coasts of the New Zealand South Island, Stewart Island, Auckland Islands and Campbell Islands. They are a popular tourist venue in Otago. On the New Zealand mainland, the Yellow-eyed penguin has declined significantly - attributed to a range of factors including climate change and fisheries. Local extinction on the mainland is possible in the next 20 to 40 years. They are larger in size, but very closely related to the recently extinct Waitaha penguin and Chatham Island Yellow-eyed penguin. Genetic work demonstrates that the Yellow-eyed penguin expanded its range from the sub-Antarctic islands to the main islands of New Zealand after the extinction of the Waitaha penguin. The Yellow-eyed penguin is classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and is considered one of the world's rarest penguin species. The Yellow-eyed penguin is a Taonga, or treasured possession in Māori culture.We sequenced the genome of an adult Yellow-eyed penguin from Otago Peninsula, New Zealand South Island (provided by Melanie Young) to a depth of approximately 88x with short reads from a series of libraries with various insert sizes (250bp-20Kb). The assembled scaffolds of high quality sequences total 1.25Gb, with the contig and scaffold N50 values of 81.99Kb and 22.24Mb respectively. We identified 16563 protein-coding genes.