94 Fun Facts About Penguins

What is the name for the way penguins leap clear of the water while swimming at speed?

Porpoising lets a penguin snatch a breath without losing speed, which is why fast-travelling dolphins and seals move in exactly the same way.

Penguins were named by European explorers after which unrelated, now-extinct Northern Hemisphere seabird?

The great auk was the original 'penguin': explorers who later met similar-looking birds in the south reused the name, and hunters killed the last known pair of great auks in 1844.

What do penguins primarily eat?

Fish, krill, and squid are swallowed whole as the penguin swims; stiff, backward-pointing spines on the tongue stop slippery prey from wriggling free.

A group of penguins swimming together at sea is sometimes called what?

A raft is also what Australia's little penguins form at dusk: they gather on the water offshore, wait for the light to fade, then cross the beach together.

Which 2006 animated film follows Mumble, an emperor penguin who cannot sing?

Happy Feet gets its title from Mumble's gift: he tap-dances instead of singing the heartsong every penguin in his colony needs to win a mate.

Which black-and-white northern seabird looks like a small penguin but, unlike one, can fly?

Puffins share the penguin's white chest, black back and stubby wings, yet the two are only distant relatives that came to look alike by hunting fish in cold seas.

Which is the smallest of all the penguin species?

The fairy penguin, also called the little or little blue penguin, comes ashore only under cover of darkness, a habit thought to keep it safe from predators.

The Galápagos penguin is the only penguin whose range crosses which line?

The equator clips the northern tip of Isabela Island, so a few Galápagos penguins live just north of it, kept cool by cold currents welling up from the deep.

Emperor penguin chicks are covered in down of what colour?

Silver-grey down, with a black head and white face mask, covers emperor chicks; it is not waterproof, so they cannot go to sea until real feathers replace it in early summer.

How do Emperor Penguin fathers keep their eggs warm?

On their feet under a fold of skin: emperors build no nest, so the father balances the egg off the ice all winter and carries the newly hatched chick the same way.

What is the term for a penguin's black-and-white coloring that provides camouflage in water?

Countershading: seen from above the dark back merges with deep water, and from below the white belly merges with the bright surface. Sharks and many fish use the same trick.

Roughly how many penguin species are alive today?

About 18 species are recognised, yet only a handful breed in Antarctica itself; most live on sub-Antarctic islands and milder coasts farther north.

Which 2005 documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman follows emperors through a breeding cycle?

March of the Penguins began as a French film in which actors voiced the penguins' own thoughts; the English release swapped that for Morgan Freeman's narration and won the documentary Oscar.

Which penguin species is the fastest swimmer?

Gentoo penguins are the sprinters of the family, which is why Gentoo Linux, a system built to be tuned for speed, borrowed the name.

How do nesting chinstrap penguins sleep, a 2023 study found?

Four-second naps, more than 10,000 of them a day, add up to about 11 hours of sleep for each half of the brain.

What lets penguins drink seawater without harm?

A gland above the eyes filters salt from the blood into a strong brine that drips from the bill or is sneezed out, which is why penguins so often seem to have a runny nose.

Which species builds rough nests out of small stones on bare, sloping ground?

Adélie penguins pick sloping sites so meltwater drains away from the eggs, and good stones are so prized that birds routinely steal them from a neighbour's nest.

Which species has a bright yellow crest sweeping back from the centre of its forehead?

Macaroni penguins apparently owe the name to English sailors, who likened the showy golden crest to the 'macaroni' dandies of the day, the fops mocked in Yankee Doodle.

Which seal is the main predator of Antarctic penguins at sea?

Leopard seals lurk almost fully submerged at the ice edge, wait for penguins to dive in, then seize a bird by the feet and thrash it against the surface.

Why do penguins never encounter polar bears in the wild?

They live in opposite hemispheres, and the names agree: 'Arctic' comes from the Greek for bear, after the bear constellations of the northern sky, while 'Antarctic' means 'opposite the Arctic'.

African penguins breed in the wild in South Africa and which other country?

Namibia shares the species with South Africa; in both, the birds nest in burrows or under rocks and bushes, shelter they need from the hot African sun.

Which seabird is notorious for snatching eggs and chicks from penguin colonies?

The skua often nests right beside a penguin colony, raising its own chicks within reach of the eggs and young it raids.

Which stop-motion children's TV character, a clay penguin first produced in Switzerland, speaks an invented 'Penguinese'?

Pingu's 'Penguinese' was improvised without a script by one Italian actor, Carlo Bonomi, who voiced every character in a nonsense language he had devised for an earlier cartoon.

Which penguin breeds only on New Zealand's Bounty and Antipodes Islands?

The erect-crested penguin lays two eggs there but almost never raises the first: it is far smaller, and nearly always lost within days of the second being laid.

How do penguins stay warm in freezing Antarctic temperatures?

Dense feathers and a fat layer work together: the feathers overlap like scales to shut out wind and water, and muscles raise them on land to trap a blanket of warm air.

What is the term for penguins shedding all their feathers at once each year?

Catastrophic moult replaces every feather in a few weeks; without a waterproof coat the birds cannot fish, so they fatten up first and then fast ashore until it is over.

Which comedy star plays a businessman who inherits six penguins in the 2011 film Mr. Popper's Penguins?

Jim Carrey plays Tom Popper, whose explorer father dies in Antarctica and wills him a live penguin as a souvenir; five more then arrive by mistake.

Linus Torvalds says a penguin nipped him on a visit to Australia's National Zoo, in which city?

Canberra's National Zoo is where, Torvalds says, a little penguin's nip gave him 'penguinitis', his joke name for the fondness that made the bird his system's emblem.

A male emperor penguin goes roughly how long without food while courting and incubating?

About 4 months pass between his arrival at the colony and the hatching of the egg; he lives on body fat alone, and huddling with other males for warmth is what makes it last.

Which seabirds are the penguins' closest living relatives?

Albatrosses and petrels are the penguins' closest living kin: genome studies make the two groups sister lineages, while the northern seabirds that look like penguins are unrelated.

The deepest dive ever logged for an emperor penguin reached roughly what depth?

About 550 metres: one bird tracked in 1994 reached 564 m, deeper than any other bird is known to go, helped by solid bones that cut the risk of pressure injury.

What do emperor penguins on a huddle's windward edge do?

Take turns in the centre: birds on the windward side peel off and shuffle round to the sheltered side, so every bird gets a spell in the warm middle and a spell on the cold edge.

What nickname does the African penguin carry because of its loud call?

Jackass is the nickname because both sexes bray like a donkey to attract a mate; the species is also called the Cape or black-footed penguin.

What is the name for emperor penguins sliding across ice on their bellies?

Tobogganing, sliding on the belly while pushing with feet and flippers, takes less effort and is quicker than the wobbling walk over long distances.

New Zealand's rare hoiho is which penguin species?

The yellow-eyed penguin was named hoiho, often translated 'noise shouter', by Māori for the shrill call it makes at its nest sites.

What is the name of the Linux operating system's penguin mascot?

Tux was drawn by Larry Ewing in 1996; the 2009 kernel release briefly replaced him with Tuz, a Tasmanian devil in a fake beak, to draw attention to the endangered animal.

How do penguin parents recognize their chick among thousands in a colony?

By unique vocalizations: every penguin has its own call, and emperors, with no nest site to return to, find mate and chick among thousands by voice alone.

The extinct giant penguin Anthropornis stood roughly as tall as which of these?

An adult human: Anthropornis reached about 1.8 m from beak to tail and 90 kg, yet giants like it died out, leaving the far smaller emperor as today's largest penguin.

Which cold undercurrent wells up around the western Galápagos, feeding the penguins there?

The Cromwell Current flows east deep beneath the Pacific until seamounts near the Galápagos force it to the surface, bringing the cold, food-rich water the penguins depend on.

What is the scientific order that all penguin species belong to?

Sphenisciformes comes from the Greek for 'little wedge', a nod to the birds' short, wedge-shaped wings, which work as flippers rather than for flight.

A penguin's flat cornea is an adaptation for seeing clearly where?

Underwater is where penguins find prey and dodge predators, so the eye is built for the sea, and a powerful lens makes up for the flat cornea on land.

Roy and Silo, two male penguins who raised a chick together, inspired which picture book?

And Tango Makes Three tells how a keeper gave the pair an egg after watching them try to hatch a rock; it became one of the most challenged books in American libraries.

Emperor and king penguin chicks huddle in what kind of group while both parents fish?

A crèche, from the French for a nursery, packs the chicks together for warmth and safety once they are too big to brood, freeing both parents to fish at the same time.

What did a 2000 study find about the penguin's side-to-side waddle?

It saves energy: each sideways sway stores momentum for the next step, like a pendulum; walking still costs penguins dearly, but the study blamed their short legs, not the waddle.

What rare genetic condition produces entirely black penguins?

Melanism floods the feathers with dark pigment, turning the white front black; the reverse fault, isabellinism, dilutes the pigment and leaves an occasional penguin looking faded, its black washed out to a pale fawn.

Adélie Land, and the Adélie penguin, were named after the wife of which French explorer?

Jules Dumont d'Urville named the coast for his wife Adèle in 1840; two years later he and his family were killed together in France's first railway disaster.

Humboldt penguins historically dug their nest burrows into what material?

Humboldt penguins burrowed into thick guano deposits; nineteenth-century fertiliser miners stripped the guano from Peruvian and Chilean islands, wiping out the breeding grounds along with them.

Punta Tombo, home to a huge Magellanic penguin colony, is in which country?

Argentina's Punta Tombo fills each September as the penguins return to nest in burrows and under bushes; by autumn they have gone, swimming north as far as the waters off Brazil.

Which crested penguin nests among tree roots in dense coastal rainforest?

The Fiordland penguin, or tawaki, nests under roots and boulders in New Zealand rainforest, then swims up to 6,800 km in about two months to fatten up before its moult.

Which penguin looks like a macaroni but has a white or pale grey face instead of a black one?

The royal penguin is so close to the macaroni that some authorities lump them as one species; hybrids between the two have been recorded in the wild.

Until 1919 a works on Macquarie Island boiled down penguins by the thousand to make what?

Oil was the product: Joseph Hatch's steam digesters rendered penguins for it for nearly three decades, until a campaign by Antarctic explorers led Tasmania to end his lease.

The emperor penguin's species name honours Johann Reinhold Forster, naturalist on whose voyage?

Forster sailed as naturalist on James Cook's second voyage (1772–75) and may have seen emperors himself in 1773–74 but logged them as king penguins; the species was not formally described until 1844.

Penguin Books merged in 2013 with which rival publisher?

Random House and Penguin became Penguin Random House, one of the 'Big Five' English-language publishers; Germany's Bertelsmann bought out its partner Pearson and has owned it outright since 2020.

Male emperor penguins can feed a newly hatched chick a curd-like 'milk', a trick shared with flamingos and which other birds?

Pigeons and doves feed their young 'pigeon milk' from the crop; the emperor's version comes from his gullet and tides the chick over only until the mother returns with fish.

Most emperor penguin colonies raise their chicks on what?

Sea ice fixed to the coast is their nursery, so when it broke up early in 2022, four of five colonies in one Antarctic sea probably lost every chick before it had waterproof feathers.

A vagrant emperor penguin came ashore on a beach in November 2024 in which country?

Australia got the surprise visitor at Ocean Beach in Denmark, Western Australia, where surfers watched him waddle ashore; after a few weeks in care he was released at sea from a boat.

A young emperor penguin that reached New Zealand in 2011 fell ill after eating what, apparently mistaking it for snow?

Sand filled his stomach until Wellington Zoo vets removed most of it; ten weeks later he was released at sea with a satellite tracker, which fell silent within days.

Several dictionaries trace the word 'penguin' to words for 'white head' in which language?

Welsh pen gwyn, 'white head', is the dictionaries' cautious guess, perhaps via an island of that name off Newfoundland; a rival theory points to the Latin pinguis, 'fat'.

What does the name of the early fossil penguin genus Waimanu mean in Māori?

Water bird is the meaning, from wai, 'water', and manu, 'bird'; the fossils suggest penguins had already given up flight for diving a few million years after the dinosaurs died out.

Fossil feathers of the Peruvian giant penguin Inkayacu revealed what colouring?

Grey and reddish brown: Inkayacu was the first fossil penguin found with its feathers, and their pigment bodies show the family's black-and-white coat evolved later.

Bob Kane said he based Batman's foe the Penguin on the mascot of which cigarette brand?

Kool's advertising penguin, with top hat and cane, was Kane's model; co-creator Bill Finger said instead that stuffy English gentlemen reminded him of emperor penguins.

Which actor played the Penguin in the 1960s Batman television series?

Burgess Meredith's quacking laugh began as a cover: the cigarette the role required made him cough, so he squawked instead, and the quack stuck.

Who played the Penguin in Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992)?

Danny DeVito led an army of penguins made up of live birds kept on chilled sets, puppets, computer effects and forty emperor suits worn by little people.

Penguin Books was co-founded in 1935 by which publisher and his two brothers?

Allen Lane, the story goes, dreamed up the sixpenny paperback at Exeter station in 1934, finding nothing worth reading on the way home from a visit to Agatha Christie.

Penguin Books' 1960 obscenity trial concerned which D. H. Lawrence novel?

Lady Chatterley's Lover was cleared by the jury, and Penguin's first print run of 200,000 copies sold out on the day the unexpurgated edition went on sale.

Which team joined the NHL alongside the Penguins in 1967?

The Philadelphia Flyers were one of six newcomers that doubled the league to twelve teams, and went on to be the first of them to win the Stanley Cup.

The Pittsburgh Penguins took their name partly from the nickname of their original home, the Civic Arena; what was it?

The Igloo was Pittsburgh's nickname for the Civic Arena, whose steel dome was built to slide open for the city's light opera company.

Which Pittsburgh Penguins great bought the bankrupt team in 1999?

Mario Lemieux was the club's biggest creditor, owed millions in unpaid salary, so he turned the debt into ownership, and in 2000 came out of retirement to play for the team he owned.

Who plays the scarred gangster Oz Cobb in the 2024 HBO series The Penguin?

Colin Farrell is unrecognisable under Mike Marino's prosthetic make-up, and has said the disguise gave him a freedom to explore that is hard to find behind his own face.

In Penguins of Madagascar (2014), the villain Dave is what kind of animal?

Dave is an octopus, voiced by John Malkovich, a jilted former zoo attraction out to avenge years of being upstaged by cuter penguins.

Which of the Madagascar penguins is the youngest, hatched from an egg the others rescued?

Private is the youngest: the 2014 spin-off opens with Skipper, Kowalski and Rico rescuing his egg from hungry seals on an abandoned whaling ship and adopting him as a brother.

In The Wrong Trousers, Feathers McGraw passes himself off as a chicken by wearing what?

Feathers wears a red rubber glove on his head to pass as a chicken; the silent penguin lodger plans to steal a blue diamond using Wallace's Techno Trousers, and the disguise somehow fools everyone.

Feathers McGraw returned as the villain of which 2024 Wallace & Gromit film?

In Vengeance Most Fowl, Feathers, imprisoned in the town zoo, hacks Wallace's robot gnome Norbot to break out and go after the blue diamond again.

Opus, the 'existentialist penguin' drawn by Berkeley Breathed, starred in which 1980s newspaper comic strip?

Bloom County introduced Opus in June 1981 as a one-off gag when Mike Binkley brought home what he thought was a German Shepherd.

Why does Pablo the penguin leave the South Pole in The Three Caballeros?

He hates the cold: fed up with freezing, Pablo sails north along the coast of South America and ends up sunning himself on a tropical island in the Galápagos.

Edinburgh Zoo's knighted king penguin Sir Nils Olav is mascot of which country's King's Guard?

Norway's King's Guard adopted the penguin on a visit to Edinburgh in 1972 and promotes him on return trips; three birds have carried the name, and the knighthood came in 2008.

What towers over the penguin colony on Zavodovski Island in the South Atlantic?

An active volcano, Mount Curry, erupted in 2016 and covered up to half the island in ash, threatening the penguins that crowd its slopes.

In winter 1911, Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard trekked to Cape Crozier to collect what?

They went for emperor penguin eggs: Wilson hoped early embryos would reveal a link between reptiles and birds, and emperors lay only in the dark of the Antarctic winter.

Which 1922 memoir by Apsley Cherry-Garrard recounts Scott's Terra Nova expedition?

The Worst Journey in the World takes its title not from the fatal march to the Pole but from a five-week midwinter trek to Cape Crozier in total darkness.

Besides selling stamps, what do Port Lockroy's 'Penguin Post Office' staff do?

Monitor the penguins: the team keeps wildlife records for the British Antarctic Survey, and half the island stays closed to visitors to show how tourism affects the birds.

Arnott's launched which chocolate biscuit in 1964 to better Britain's Penguin?

Tim Tam's creator Ian Norris tried a Penguin on a 1958 trip to Britain and set out to 'make a better one'; the name came from that year's Kentucky Derby winner.

In the online game Club Penguin, what were the in-game pets called?

Puffles were Club Penguin's furry round pets; Disney paid $350 million for the game's creator in 2007, and the servers finally went dark on 30 March 2017.

In the 2015 film Oddball, what kind of animal guards a colony of little penguins from foxes?

A sheepdog: Maremmas have guarded the real colony on Middle Island since 2006, after fox attacks had all but wiped it out.

What cut the Galápagos penguin population by three-quarters in 1982–83?

An El Niño warms the sea around the islands and the fish vanish; the penguins put off breeding, and in 1982–83 about 77% of them starved.

Which cartoon penguin starred in fifty shorts from the studio behind Woody Woodpecker?

Chilly Willy became Walter Lantz's second-biggest star after Woody once director Tex Avery reworked the little penguin, who is forever scheming to get warm.

A 2015 genetic study found penguins have kept only two of the five basic tastes, sour and which other?

Salty and sour are all that remain: the genes for sweet, bitter and umami receptors are broken in every penguin, odd for fish-eaters, though they swallow prey whole anyway.

What had happened to the biggest king penguin colony, on Île aux Cochons, by 2017?

Lost most birds: about half a million breeding pairs in the 1980s had shrunk to some 60,000, a fall of nearly 90% that researchers could not explain.

Where in Australia do little penguins stage a famous nightly 'parade' across Summerland Beach?

Phillip Island's parade is so prized that the state bought back a whole housing estate on the peninsula and cleared away its last houses to return the land to the penguins.

The gentoo's species name records a naturalist's mistaken belief that it lived on which island north of Australia?

New Guinea has no penguins: gentoos breed on sub-Antarctic islands and the Antarctic Peninsula, thousands of kilometres to the south, yet the 1781 name papua has stuck.

Researchers tell individual African penguins apart by the unique pattern of what?

Black spots on the chest form a pattern unique to each African penguin, like a fingerprint, but a young bird has none: its chest stays plain until the adult plumage grows in.

Grape-kun, a Humboldt penguin at Japan's Tobu Zoo, became famous in 2017 for his devotion to what?

An anime character cutout of Hululu, a penguin girl from Kemono Friends, held his gaze for hours each day; when he died that October, the zoo and fans around the world mourned him.

The preschool hit Pororo the Little Penguin was created in which country?

Its first two seasons were jointly made by designers from North and South Korea under a 2000 inter-Korean cooperation deal.

What do emperor penguin pairs do if they lose their egg during the handover?

They part and head back to sea, because an egg on the ice freezes within a minute or two and emperors lay only one a year; both return next season to try again.

Why do penguins lose so little body heat through their flippers?

Blood warming blood: outgoing blood warms returning blood in a net called the humeral plexus, which fossils show arose at least 49 million years ago, in a far warmer world.