I have to say that I enjoyed the first episode of ‘Penguins – Spy in the Huddle’ on BBC1 on Monday in high definition. The camera work was fantastic especially due to the ingenious penguin cameras. The producers managed to portray these animals in a sympathetic light with just enough use of comedy noises to lend an air of familiarity. Penguins look clumsy and out of place when they are on land but as soon as they enter the water it is a completely different story, there they are literally in their element. For me the programme also got the balance right between good story telling and the never ending struggle for survival and the cruelty of nature. It was very good.
Anyway that wasn’t just what I wanted to say. There were a couple of things that really interested me about some of their behaviours that I picked out of the programme. The first related to the Rockhopper Penguin and the second to the iconic Emperor Penguin.
The Rockhopper Penguin gets its name unsurprisingly from the way that it gets about on land. They come ashore to breed and climb the cliffs away from the beach for a degree of safety but then they do have to face the aerial threat of the Skua. What I found interesting was that, even though they laid their eggs in a small depression in the ground some of the males still make the effort to build a very flimsy and meaningless nest from the twigs and moss that are lying about. It’s not anything that you would call a nest and I doubt it offers any protection worth talking about yet they still do it.
The Emperor, as seen on Happy Feet, is the largest of all the Penguins and is the one that most people will think of when asked. Again they come ashore to breed but this time they make their way across the frozen seas off Antarctica, waddling and sledging for many miles until they reach a spot close to the shore line. Apparently they always return to the same spot where they remain to bring up the chicks in some of the harshest weather to be found anywhere on the planet. They pass the winter in the most impossible conditions and yet they still come back.
OK, so you could argue that these are strategies that improve reproductive effectiveness and so live on in the gene pool, but really? The nests were so flimsy and Rockhopper mates for life and so I can’t see this being a significant part of the courtship decision. Emperor Penguins don’t have land based predators and so a shorter distance away from the sea would have had the same effect as a long walk.
What I think is happening here and it is only a hunch, is that there is some genetic memory at play. Both behaviours are locked into their DNA from a time long ago when these things did make a difference. Somewhere in the dim and distant past Rockhoppers, or their ancestors made nests like many other bird species. They were important then to protect their eggs. It may even have been from a time when they were birds that could fly. As for the Emperors my guess is that they or their distant ancestors used to nest on the shoreline in Antarctica at a time when there was no, or very little sea ice. Over time the sea has become more and more frozen through the winters and the birds have kept returning year after year, not cognizant of the increasingly unnecessary distance that they are walking.
I might be right, I guess I’ll never know but I’m now wondering how many other species, including our own are doing very similar things. I will be watching the second episode with increased interest next Monday.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 