The GCW Tour, Buenos Aires & Antarctica: A Few Facts -- and a Fiction -- About Penguins

Today's lecture was a about penguins. A learned a few things, most of them somewhat disgusting, that seemed worth sharing:

There are eighteen different species of penguin. The biggest is the Emperor Penguin and the smallest is the Little Blue Penguin that lives in New Zealand. (I've added it to my list of things to seek out in March.)

Penguins employ what might be called projectile pooping. Because they're stuck in their nests looking after their eggs and can't leave to poop, they have to shoot it an appropriate distance. There was even a paper written that calculated the forces involved (with figures!).

Penguins eat krill, and krill are toxic. They have two adaptations to deal with it. First, their digestion works very fast and so start to finish, the krill don't stay long in the penguin. Second, every now in then a penguin will cough up the lining to their stomach and grow a new one. And while the toxic stomach lining is of little more than photographic interest, the penguin poo full of undigested krill bits apparently becomes a significant food source for other birds.

Now for the fiction. Our ornithologist showed this short ad from the BBC and I found it on YouTube. It's pretty funny and worth the ninety seconds it takes to watch it...