A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind QI, the BBC quiz show. This week: QI p-p-p-picks up a penguin
Quit your blubbering: (l-r) Kowalski, Skipper, Private and Rico, aka the Penguins of 'Madagascar’ Photo: Film Stills
One can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin. John Ruskin
Auk
The original derivation of the word “penguin” is unclear – the earliest
mention is in an account of Richard Hore’s voyage to Cape Breton in
Newfoundland in 1536, where the Welsh crew called the abundant flightless
fowl, they found there “pen gwyn”, meaning “white head”. Others have
suggested the word came from pinguis (Latin for “fat”) or “pin-wing” (a bird
that has been rendered incapable of flying by having its wings clipped).
Forty years later, as Sir Francis Drake was sailing the Golden Hind around
the Magellan Straits, there is another record of “foule, which the Welsh men
name Pengwin”. What seems likely is that Hore’s men had simply mistaken the
auks of the northern hemisphere for the for the superficially similar but
unrelated “true” penguins of the southern hemisphere, and the name stuck.
The French still refer to the now extinct great auk as grand pingouin, and
the related razorbill as pingouin. Their word for “penguin” is gorfue.
In 1620, Admiral Beaulieu, the French explorer, thought penguins were feathered fish. They are creatures of both land and sea – they need to lay eggs and keep them warm so can’t completely abandon the land, but they have adapted for the sea. As penguins used their wings to swim they eventually sacrificed their ability to fly in order to be better at “flying” underwater. Some species of penguins can leap, which helps them get from the water onto rocks or over ice. Adélie penguins can jump 2-3m (8-10ft) in the air, while emperor penguins can only manage 45cm (18in), which is just enough to help them clear the edge of the ice.
Walk
Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) are named after the wife of another Frenchman, Jules Sebastien Cesar Dumont D’Urville (1790-1842). In 1840, his ship reached an island off the Antarctic ice shelf, which his men named D’Urville Island in his honour. Later, they came across a little, fat penguin with a black coat and a white apron and named it after his wife, Adélie. The Adélie penguin lives in vast communities of up to 750,000 birds. Like other penguins, they have a manoeuvre called a “slender walk” where they pin their flippers back when squeezing through crowds.
Stones
Adélie penguins build their nests with stones, a rare commodity in Antarctica and one for which they are willing to pay. When their partner’s back is turned, they trade “intimate favours” with other single males in return for bigger, better stones – the only known example of bird prostitution. “Client” males are sometimes so satisfied with the service that females can come back for more stones without offering sex, merely a little light courtship. One particularly flirtatious female managed to acquire 62 rocks in this way. The males clearly believe the loss of stones is worth it for the opportunity to father more chicks. Zoologists speculate that the female may be trying to improve the genetic variability of her offspring.
George Murray Levick, a scientist who was part of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition, was so shocked by the sexual antics of the Adélies that he wrote his notes in Greek so only a select few would be able to know the truth. Scott’s team ate stewed penguin at Christmas.
Poo
Penguins excrete by standing on the stony rim of their nests, leaning forward slightly and squirting powerfully outwards. They can generate rectal pressures four times as great as those of a human – about the same as a keg lager. This propels their droppings over 2ft (60cm) away from the nest wall.
Feathers
Penguins’ feathers are packed together four times as densely as flying birds’ (more than 70 per square inch), to keep water out and to trap a layer of air next to their skin. It is this, rather than their thin layer of blubber, which keeps them warm, rather like a Thermos flask. Their black and white colouring is designed (like fish) to blend in with the sea when looked at from either above or below.
Scarborough
While they don’t mind cold, penguins don’t like constant wind and rain. The Humboldt penguins at Scarborough’s Sea Life Sanctuary have been put on anti-fungal medication to reduce stress caused by the persistent bad weather of recent months. It’s not the first time the birds have required medication. In 2011 they succumbed to panic attacks after someone broke into their enclosure but have now made a full recovery.
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