Learn about Penguins
While Penguins may be considered birds, they are not your typical feathered friend! These flightless creatures spend as much time in the water as on land. Penguins are instantly recognizable with their tuxedo like coats and webbed feet and are truly remarkable animals!
You can help keep these marvelous animals around by helping prevent climate change. Plastic pollution is one of the greatest threats causing harms to Penguins. The changing climate is also a great threat to them. You can help reduce your carbon footprint by making little changes in your everyday life such as watching your energy usage, lowering you water use, and recycling. By reducing your carbon footprint, it can help stop the changes to climate change and keep penguins around for centuries to come.
In honor of National Penguin Day January 20th, here are a few fun facts to know about Penguins:
Many Penguins Pick Lifelong Mates
Typically, the females pick their mates. Males make a nest site and use different noises and movements to allure a female mate. Most Penguins will have the same mate season to season. Usually, females only pick another mate if the male mate does not return to the same nesting site, as males arrive to the breading sites first.
Penguins Have Adapted Well to Marine Environments
Penguins spend about half of their time on land and the other half in the water. Between the ocean and snow, they have adapted well to survive around water. With amazing swimming abilities, Penguins can dive to great depths to look for food. Emperor penguins can dive to depths over 500 meters! Their feathers overlap and are waterproof and windproof to help protect them from the cold. Penguins also have a fat layer for insulation to help keep them warm.
Emperor Penguins Have Been to Proposed to be on the Endangered Species List
With climates changing, it is greatly affecting the areas penguins call home. The Emperor Penguin is the largest bird of the penguin species. Their colonies can be as large as over 20,000. Most Emperor colonies are situated on “Fast Ice”, a wide area of sea ice located around islands or icebergs. Because these ice areas are changing due to climate changes, the Penguins’ habitats are becoming smaller and smaller. The Emperor Penguin is now considered Near Threatened on the Endangered Species list. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, scientists project 80% of the world’s emperor Penguins will disappear by the end of the century without major cuts to carbon pollution.
Most Penguins Live in the Southern Hemisphere
While we typically thing of them living in the North and South Poles, there are no Penguins in the North Pole. Most only live in the Southern Hemisphere, and you can find large colonies of Penguins located in Antarctica, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, and Argentina. The only Penguins that live above the equator are the Galapagos penguins. The Galapagos Islands are right on the equator line, which is the farthest north you will find any in their natural environment.
Penguins are Great at Foraging
Because they are such great swimmer, Penguins hunt all their prey in the ocean. Penguins’ diets consist of fish, krill, shrimp, crabs, and occasionally squid and cuttlefish. Unlike most land animals, they also drink ocean water! Their diets also change depending on the species of penguin and the environment they live in.