Each year in December, penguins with long blonde eyebrows swim away from the shores of New Zealand for a two-month marathon swim halfway to Antarctica and back. The breathtaking distance was recorded by researchers, who for the first time managed to track the birds. Penguins, universally adored and the stars of cartoons, are actually not well studied.
One third of all penguin species live in New Zealand, where they are part of the landscape, mostly in the wilder south. Nevertheless most penguin species are considered vulnerable or endangered.
Until now it was unclear where one penguin species — the Fiordland crested penguin (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus) — migrated each year in search of food.
Zoologists assumed that they stayed near the coast. To find out, researchers with the Tawaki Project — which uses the bird’s local name — attached satellite tracking tags to 20 penguins and followed their migration daily.
“My first reaction was there’s something wrong with the data,” said Thomas Mattern, a research fellow in Department of Zoology, University of Otago, New Zealand and the project director.
“Then I was just puzzled, I was completely flabbergasted — where are they going, when will they stop?”
The penguins swam halfway to Antarctica, in areas where the warm northern waters collide with the cold waters of the south. Then they swam back New Zealand.
Round trip, a female travelled 6,801 kilometres (4,226 miles) in 67 days. A male swam 5,597 kilometres (3,478 miles) in 77 days. The complete data relates to only five animals, because the tags seem to have detached from the 15 others being tracked during their trip.
This new information confirms that penguins are among the most extraordinary vertebrate swimmers on the planet. According to Mattern, the Russians had even studied the hydrodynamics of penguin feathers to mimic it for their submarines.
The penguin study was published on Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS One.— AFP
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