Today's picture is one of my holiday snaps - this one was seen rock hopping and jumping in the water in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand. Apologies for the grainyness but it was necessary to zoom in quite a bit in order to see him properly!
To celebrate Penguin Awareness Day here are 10 things you may not know about penguins:
1. All penguin species are native to the Southern Hemisphere, but they don't all live in very cold places. One species, the Galápagos Penguin, lives near the equator.
2. The largest living species is the Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) which is 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall on average and weighs 35 kg (75 lb) or more. The smallest penguin species is the Little Blue Penguin or Fairy Penguin(Eudyptula minor), which is only 40 cm tall (16 in) and weighs 1 kg (2.2 lb).
3. Some prehistoric species of penguin were as tall or as heavy as an adult human.
4. There is some dispute about the origin of the word "Penguin" which was first used in the 16th century as a synonym for the Great Auk - when European explorers first saw penguins in the Southern Hemisphere, they named them after the auk, because they were similar, even though the two species are not related. Some say it comes from pingouin, the French word for "auk". Others say it is derived from the Welsh word pen, meaning "head" and gwyn, meaning "white". Still others suggest it comes from the Latin pinguis which means "fat". In Dutch an alternative word for penguin translates as “fat-goose”.
5. Within the penguins' plumage there is a layer of air. This has two functions: maintaining buoyancy, and insulation in cold water.
6. Penguins can drink salt water because their supra-orbital gland filters excess salt from the bloodstream.
7. A penguin can swim at about 15MPH.
8. As an April Fools day joke, on April 1, 2008 the BBC released a short film of penguins in flight migrating to the South American rainforest.
9. Popular cartoon representations of penguins and Polar Bears together on Christmas cards and the like are completely wrong. Polar bears live in the Arctic in the Northern Hemisphere and penguins only live in the southern hemisphere. The only place they could possibly ever meet is in a zoo!
10. There is an urban myth that if a plane flies over a penguin colony the birds look up at the plane and watch it until they topple over and cannot get up again. Someone has even claimed to be employed by the military to go round picking the fallen penguins up after a flyover! Recent research has shown that penguins may wobble a little, or waddle away in fright when a plane passes, but they don't fall over. And the Penguin Picker-Upper? Turned out to be a con artist.
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