The Scoop on Penguins – Feathered Fish or Bodacious Bird?

The Scoop on Penguins – Feathered Fish or Bodacious Bird?

The Scoop on Penguins – Feathered Fish or Bodacious Bird?

February 28, 2007

EDITOR’S NOTE: Megan Maher is a student in New York. Her article on penguins will appear in Spring 2007 issue of Kids X-Press magazine. Megan’s work was peer-reviewed by scientists and keepers at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

What swims like an olympic champion? What plunges underwater holding its breath like a free diver? What slides like a baseball player racing to reach base?

A penguin, of course!

Penguins are birds that can toboggan on ice using their webbed feet to propel them. The fastest penguin, the gentoo, can swim about 15 miles per hour, faster than long-distance runners. Penguins can also dive very deep, some to depths of about 1,750 feet. They use their wings (which are really like flippers) to propel themselves in the water. It looks as if they are “flying” underwater, something they cannot do in the air.

Penguins are always dressed for success in their formal black and white feathers. There are about 70 feathers per square inch on their bodies. The dense feathers provide insulation and keep the penguins warm. White feathers are on the underbelly and serve as a form of camouflage. When a predator, possibly a seal, looks up at a penguin swimming on the ocean’s surface, the penguin is harder to see because it blends in with the light from above. Other predators at sea that penguins have to watch out for are sea lions and giant petrels. On land, penguins must protect their eggs and chicks from kelp gulls and great skuas.

Magellanic penguin in Argentina. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher. Dr. Pablo Yorio of WCS. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher, staff photographer for WCS. Nancy Gonzalez, Senior Wild Animal Keeper at the Bronx Zoo. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher.

Some like it cold, some like it hot. All penguins in the wild live in the Southern Hemisphere. Some types, like chinstraps and gentoos, prefer the cooler climate of the sub Antarctic area for nesting. Others, like the Magellanics, live on the coast of Argentina, where it can get quite warm in the summer.

Penguin parents lay their eggs on land once a year in nice weather. Usually they lay one or two eggs, but it depends on the species.

With emperor penguins, it is the dad that incubates the egg. He keeps it warm by holding it under a fold of skin on top of his feet. The emperor mom prepares for her baby by going fishing at sea, coming back in time to feed the newly hatched chick with fish, krill, or squid.

Magellanic penguins return to the same nest year after year, leaving it in the winter. The mom lays two eggs, and the parents take turns lying on top of the eggs to incubate them. After the chicks hatch, they can be seen peering out from beneath their parents like fuzzy slippers. Baby care is a joint operation. Both parents take turns to fish, then return to the nest to regurgitate a meal for the chicks.

Penguins range in size from 12 to 48 inches. The largest penguin is the emperor of Antarctica, and the smallest is the fairy from Australia.

Penguins are noisy and use various calls to find their families. Magellanics and gentoos bray, and chinstraps scream, which can cause quite a ruckus in the colonies where they live.

There are 17 types of penguins in the world. The penguins that I found out about—Magellanics, chinstraps, and gentoos—live at the Bronx and Central Park Zoos and in Argentina, where the Wildlife Conservation Society has a program to protect Magellanic penguins.

I had the extraordinary opportunity to interview some of the world’s best experts on penguins: Nancy Gonzalez, Senior Wild Animal Keeper, who cares for Magellanic penguins at the Bronx Zoo; Rob Gramzay, Senior Wild Animal Keeper, who takes care of chinstrap and gentoo penguins at the Central Park Zoo; and Dr. Pablo Yorio, WCS Conservationist, who studies Magellanic penguins and many other sea birds in Argentina.

Here is what they had to say about penguins and their future:

Megan: How long does a penguin egg need to be incubated and why?

Rob: The penguins at Central Park Zoo are incubated for 34 days. The king and emperor penguins need 52-56 days for incubation. They all lay one egg per year when the weather is good.

Nancy: Magellanic eggs are incubated for 40 days. Both parents take turns incubating, and both protect and care for the egg and chick.

Megan: When do penguins start to swim?

Rob: Chicks at Central Park Zoo start to swim at two to two and a half months, when they get their waterproof feathers.

Megan: How long can penguins stay underwater on one of their big dives?

Rob: King and emperor penguins can stay under the water for as much as six minutes. Gentoo and chinstrap penguins stay under for about a minute to a minute and a half.

Rob Gramzay, Senior Wild Animal Keeper at the Central Park Zoo. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher. Gentoo penguin at the Central Park Zoo. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher.

Megan: What is the average size of a Magellanic penguin?

Nancy: Our birds at the Bronx Zoo are about 20″ high, and the females are usually a bit smaller than the males.

Megan: How does the Central Park Zoo make the penguin exhibit more like their habitat in the wild?

Rob: We keep the lighting like the seasons where they are from (with dimmer lights during their winter, for example), and we check and change the lighting regularly, to make sure the conditions are much the same as in the wild.

Megan: What does the Bronx Zoo do to help the penguins feel at home?

Nancy: We try to encourage their natural behaviors by giving them challenges they would face in the wild. We give them live fish to hunt several times a week, and we turn up the water volume really high every now and then to give them a strong “current” to swim against. They really like this!

Megan: What do you like most about working with penguins?

Nancy: There are many things to choose from, but I guess one of my favorite things is that they all have such distinctive personalities. They are funny and sweet and demanding all in one tiny package.

Megan: What do penguins eat?

Rob: We feed them fish, krill and shrimp, and occasionally squid.

Pablo: In the wild, Magellanic penguins eat anchovy, hake, and sometimes squid.

Megan: Where do Magellanic penguins live in the wild? And at the Bronx Zoo?

Nancy: In the wild, they are found all around an area in South America called Patagonia, all along the coasts from Argentina, and all the way down to the very tip of South America and along the coasts of Chile. They are also found on nearby islands, such as the Falkland Islands. The penguins at the Bronx Zoo live in a large aviary that is designed to look like their natural home, along with a few of their natural bird neighbors, like Inca terns and guanay cormorants.

Megan: How many penguins live at the Bronx Zoo?

Nancy: We have ten penguins—five males and five females.

Megan: How long do the Magellanic penguins live?

Nancy: In captivity, they can live up to around thirty years.

Megan: How many Magellanic penguins are in your WCS study area in Argentina?

Pablo: In the province of Chubut in Argentina where I work, there are a total of 530,000 pairs of Magellanic penguins (that is more than 1 million breeding birds).

Megan: How many Magellanic penguins are left in the wild?

Pablo: There are over 1 million breeding pairs (meaning more than 2 million penguins) breeding along the Patagonian coast of Argentina.

Megan: Are they endangered?

Nancy: Magellanic penguins are not endangered, but they are considered to be “near threatened”. This means that they may be threatened with extinction in the near future, and their population is closely watched by conservation groups like WCS.

Pablo: We work in the field in Argentina to keep the penguins from falling any further down the endangered list. Our conservation efforts, like working with the government to establish national parks and protected areas, will hopefully improve their population status.

Megan: What environmental issues affect penguins?

Rob: One of the things that affect some penguins is climate change. Antarctica is melting and if chicks don’t have their feathers and can’t swim, they can drown and freeze in the cold water or get stuck in between ice caps. The changes in the ice also can keep the parents from getting back to the chicks to feed them, and the chicks can starve. Another effect on penguins is the impact of people—overfishing, pollution, oil spills, and trash floating around that the penguins could eat or get stuck in. Guano mining (bird poop harvested and used for fertilizer) also disturbs nesting colonies.

Pablo: The main threats for Magellanic penguins are growing commercial fisheries, oil development, and unregulated tourism.

Nancy: Penguins are vulnerable to oil spills and sometimes entire colonies are affected by spills off the coast, especially during the breeding season. Also, coastal habitat destruction of nesting sites can cause a lot of damage to penguin populations because penguins usually try to return to the same nest site year after year.

Megan: What does your work do to help protect the penguins?

Pablo: We are currently monitoring several penguin colonies to assess the “health” of their populations and study the use of their feeding areas in a coastal sector proposed as a new marine national park (Golfo San Jorge) along the coast of Argentina. How the penguins feed and find food will help make decisions about this new protected area. We are working to establish plans so that fishing and other disruptive activities do not have negative effects on penguins, and other sea birds and marine mammals that live there.

Megan: What can kids do to help make sure penguins are protected and thriving?

Rob: Kids should be concerned about litter. They should tell people not to throw trash in the street or in the water. Kids should be aware of what is happening around the world. They should keep their eyes and ears open to what happens with penguins in the news. Kids can get involved by letting their congressmen know they are concerned about conservation of penguins and the environment.

Nancy: Kids that visit the Bronx Zoo help every day, because the Bronx Zoo supports a really dedicated group of field researchers like Pablo that monitor penguin populations and talk to local authorities about conserving them. Kids who are really into penguins can “adopt” a penguin online for a fee, and the money will go to supporting fieldwork. Other things kids can do are more simple, like recycling as much as possible, and trying not to litter. A lot of human trash will end up in the oceans, and cleaner oceans means healthier oceans and more food for the penguins.

Links

• WCS
• Bronx Zoo
• Central Park Zoo

About Kids X-Press

Kids X-Press,Inc., is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote literacy. We encourage children of all abilities, and from all ethnic, social and economic backgrounds, to express themselves, and we provide them a forum through which they can communicate to the public the world from a kid’s-eye-view.

This article is based on a news release from CSIRO.
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