22: Mata Mata & Emperor Penguin
Ellen: Hey there! This is Ellen Weatherford.
Christian: And Christian Weatherford.
Ellen: And this is Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast where we take your favorite species of animals, we review them and we rate them out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity and aesthetics.
Christian: You know, we say favorite animals, but I don't think anyone would call the botfly their favorite. Except me.
Ellen: That was also not requested by anybody. That was just you being vindictive. Anyway, we take your requests for species of animals and we review them comprehensively and rate them out of 10 in different categories. We are not zoological experts, but we do a lot of research to get ready for the show and we make sure that we're getting our information from trustworthy and reliable sources. So if you are a zoological expert, feel free to link up with us and let us know your thoughts and give us feedback and such. We're very thrilled to hear from people all the time.
Christian: Yeah, reach out to us, you reliable source, you.
Ellen: Yeah, thanks. We really appreciate it. That sounded sarcastic, but it wasn't meant to be, I promise. That's all I got for the intro, and I think that last week I went first. So Christian, it's your turn.
Christian: Okay. This week, I've got an animal that I think has a fun name, called the matamata turtle. Couple of different, not really spellings, but I guess arrangement of that name. You'll see matamata as one word, you'll see them separated by a hyphen, and sometimes by a space.
Ellen: Oh, sure.
Christian: And sometimes they won't even say turtle, they'll just say matamata. So...
Ellen: But it is a turtle, though?
Christian: It is a turtle. It is defo turt.
Ellen: Certified turt. Turtified.
Christian: The scientific name for this little guy, maybe not little, but the scientific name is Chelus fimbriata, and this species was submitted by Erica Carr and Miranda Lowrey.
Ellen: Thanks, y'all.
Christian: Thank you. And my information for this one is coming from some familiar sources: The Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, the website is found at nationalzoo.si.edu.
Ellen: Nice.
Christian: And also from Animal Diversity Web, found at animaldiversity.org.
Ellen: Love them.
Christian: Yes. Let's talk about the matamata generally. So these guys can grow up to almost 45 centimeters long based on their shell. I'm not sure why, but all of the lengths that I found for the matamata was all based on the shell size. I'm not really sure why that is. Maybe that's just common in turtles.
Ellen: I guess it's probably because like, they can retract into their shell.
Christian: Well, and here's the thing. Most turtles, that would represent the majority of their length, whereas the matamata has a fairly long neck.
Ellen: Oh...
Christian: Yeah. So anyway, up to 45 centimeters long, which was about a foot and a half, and they can weigh 17.2 kilograms or 38 pounds.
Ellen: That's a chunky boy.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Hefty turtle.
Christian: Where these guys can be found is in the Amazon and Northern South America, including Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia, and also the Island of Trinidad.
Ellen: Oh wow! That's cool.
Christian: Yeah. They belong to the taxonomic family Chelidae, these guys are known as the Austro-South American side-neck turtles, as in Australia.
Ellen: Oh, okay.
Christian: And what side-neck means is they bend their necks to the side when pulling them under the edge of their shell or carapace, rather than retracting it directly inward.
Ellen: Oh, okay. So they're coming at it from an angle.
Christian: Yeah. So these guys, they have a, of course a turtle shell, and these are primarily aquatic turtles. So this kind of gives you an idea of what they kind of look like. They have shells with big ridges. They remind me of Bowser, personally.
Ellen: Like, they're spiky?
Christian: Yeah, yeah.
Ellen: Okay, okay.
Christian: And they have webbed feet with claws, all four feet are webbed. They have that long neck that I mentioned earlier, and then that neck has fringes and like, almost wart-type things coming off of it. Their head is triangular, and they have a thin tube coming off of their nose, and small eyes and a big wide mouth. If you look at them from head on, it kind of looks like they're smiling.
Ellen: Okay!
Christian: And often with this kind of turtle you'll see them with moss growing on their shell and body in general. So that's kind of just to set the picture going forward.
Ellen: This is painting a really bizarre zoological picture for me. I'm imagining something very strange.
Christian: Yeah, yeah. Effectiveness, this is how good they do the things they do. Physical adaptations, built-in lasers. No, I'm just kidding. So for the matamata, I'm giving an 8 out of 10 for effectiveness, and some of the big points here are around camouflage. So the way the neck is, and the head, it is meant to look like foliage, like at the bottom of a body of water.
Ellen: That makes sense.
Christian: And also the tendency for moss to grow on the shell helps with this. Also, how they eat. Did not know this at all before researching the matamata, not that I was an expert in it to begin with.
Ellen: Yeah, I know nothing, so whatever you're about to tell me is going to be surprising to me.
Christian: Um, so out of curiosity, how would you guess that these, these things eat?
Ellen: With their mouth.
Christian: I guess you can assume they're, what, carnivores or plant eaters or?
Ellen: Um, let me think... Okay. You said it has a tube.... It has like a, like a narrow tapered mouth in some way?
Christian: Well, its nose has a thin tube.
Ellen: Okay...
Christian: But its mouth is big and wide.
Ellen: And a wide mouth. Hmm. I guess I would assume that they would maybe eat small fish?
Christian: Yeah, you're right.
Ellen: Oh, great!
Christian: So here's how they do it, though. They don't just go and chomp down on a fish in the water. What they do is they use this pretty unique method of capturing fish. So its bite is actually pretty weak, but what it does is, with is neck fully extended and there's a fish nearby, what it does is it- when the fish is close to its mouth, it quickly opens its mouth and it expands its neck...
Ellen: What.
Christian: To cause a sudden low pressure that sucks in the fish, and then they swallow it whole.
Ellen: This- so, I'm thinking of it as like the hose attachment of a vacuum cleaner.
Christian: Basically. Um, but it's crazy and I encourage everyone to go look at a YouTube video of this, but its neck expands in terms of diameter, to just basically suck in the water and the fish.
Ellen: So when I talked about the axolotl, I talked about how it has that really big wide mouth and it would suck prey in by opening its mouth very quickly.
Christian: Yes, it's that, but also not just opening its mouth quickly, it's also expanding its neck. So kind of compounding that effect.
Ellen: Oh, I see.
Christian: So think of it as having bellows underwater, and as you pull it open, it's causing a low pressure to suck in water. So that's what's happening.
Ellen: Wow. That's crazy.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Huh. I guess that explains why its neck is so long, then. To just give it space.
Christian: It just, "wah," like inflates. So, yeah it's crazy. So they suck in the fish and let the excess water escape as things start to kind of close back up, and then they'll swallow the fish whole.
Ellen: Does the water escape back out through the mouth?
Christian: Yeah, it kinda like, half closes its mouth basically to let the water escape.
Ellen: Huh.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Does it have any method to, I guess, separate the fish that it's trying to eat from anything else that may have gotten in there, like rocks or something?
Christian: I mean, I assume this is kind of a common problem for most reptiles underwater.
Ellen: Sure.
Christian: But it makes do, it just eats them whole. Alive.
Ellen: You take the good with the bad, I guess. Okay, so it eats the fish alive. It doesn't chew them or anything.
Christian: Yup.
Ellen: Huh. That's brutal.
Christian: Right? And the next point I want to give it was its nose, and I actually refer to it as a snorkel nose. Cause what it's meant to do is it just- so this turtle almost is always underwater, and it uses that snorkel nose just to expose the bare minimum of itself above the surface of the water to breathe. Now here's what's strange, a little bit about this guy that is under the water all the time: it has very poor eyesight.
Ellen: Oh...
Christian: Yeah. But it makes up for it. The fringes and whatnot on it's neck allows it to sense vibrations in the water very, very well.
Ellen: I would imagine it's in very murky water, so it's probably not going to get much through vision anyway.
Christian: True.
Ellen: Like even if it did have good eyesight, it probably wouldn't really be seeing much.
Christian: True, because these things are found in slow-moving or stagnant water that's not very deep.
Ellen: Probably a lot of sediment in the water and stuff. So it makes sense that they would be more interested in using feelers. So like, the electric eel used the electricity to sense its environment, so when you are living in a low visibility area, it makes sense for you to kind of find other ways to perceive your world.
Christian: So yeah, the way it does that is through vibrations and also having very good... I say ears, but they're not really ears in turtles. They work a little differently. But same concept though, it can hear sounds very, very well.
Ellen: Oh, okay.
Christian: The main deduction I have for effectiveness is they actually aren't very good swimmers.
Ellen: Oh- what! That's the one thing you gotta do though!
Christian: So they're actually, they're not very good at swimming, but they're better equipped to walk on the muddy beds in the shallow water, rather than swimming in the open water.
Ellen: I mean, I guess, but if you gotta live in the water!
Christian: It can make do, it's just, it's not very good at it.
Ellen: Aw, man.
Christian: Which makes, I guess it kind of makes sense cause it's kinda hanging out on the bottom, waiting for fish to come to it. Right? Cause it's not actively hunting fish.
Ellen: Yeah. But they still like, they have to come up to the surface to breathe, and...
Christian: I think that's why they like shallow water, because it's not a big distance between the bottom and the surface.
Ellen: I mean, I guess they need it to be that way cause they're not good swimmers.
Christian: Well they could do it. It's just not graceful at all. So yeah, effectiveness, 8 out of 10. Ingenuity, so this is how they do smart things. Examples of this could be tool use or interesting methodologies. I'm giving a 6 out of 10. I found its feeding method to be interesting, of course, so kind of going back to that, but also,, it's use of camouflage. I think that's interesting. But otherwise, not anything else, particularly...
Ellen: Just beneficial behaviors, but they're not necessarily figuring anything out.
Christian: Yeah. Yeah. I did read somewhere though that they've been studied to, I guess, move fish into a more restrictive area before sucking them up.
Ellen: You mean, like herding them somewhere?
Christian: Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't find very much info about that though.
Ellen: That's something to keep in the back of the head.
Christian: Yeah. So 6 out of 10 for ingenuity.
Ellen: It's not bad.
Christian: Aesthetics: I'm giving this one a 7 out of 10.
Ellen: Really?
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: ...Really?
Christian: I think they look interesting.
Ellen: Interesting, yes. Good, though?
Christian: I think they're interesting. The combination of their spiky shell and the triangular head with a long neck, you know, with all the frills and the moss. I think it's an interesting look.
Ellen: What I'm thinking of, I know there's a Pokémon based on this turtle.
Christian: Yes, there is.
Ellen: What is it called?
Christian: I don't know.
Ellen: Hold on...
Christian: It's one of the generations I didn't play. It's the fire turtle, I think?
Ellen: Yeah... You did play, cause this was in sun and moon.
Christian: Oh. See, that's the problem with having skipped some generations. I don't always know what is new and what was already there.
Ellen: Oh my God. You're going to love what it's called.
Christian: What is it?
Ellen: I just Googled it. Turtonator.
Christian: Haha! K.
Ellen: I forgot all about this Pokémon because it was in Sun and Moon, I believe, which I played, but I didn't play a lot of, and I think it's kind of, I think it's ugly. I'm sorry. I think it's really ugly.
Christian: Well, I think the actual matamata looks much cooler than that.
Ellen: Well, so we have seen a matamata. We saw one, I believe at the Atlanta Zoo? I think they had one in there. And I think we only like barely saw it, but I found it, um, kind of ugly.
Christian: There could be variations, in terms of color.
Ellen: Yeah. Okay. I'm looking at a picture of it right now. And interesting is... a correct descriptor of the way it looks. Interesting is a word you could use to describe it.
Christian: Well, it's all arbitrary. So...
Ellen: I know.
Christian: 7 out of 10.
Ellen: I know. That's- and that's you, that's a you thing.
Christian: That's it for my scores. Some more miscellaneous info: its conservation status is not evaluated on the IUCN Red List. It is popular in the exotic and illegal pet trade.
Ellen: Oh wow.
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: So people have these.
Christian: Mhmm.
Ellen: ...Why though?
Christian: Because of their uniqueness, I suppose.
Ellen: I mean, I guess.
Christian: I also read that at one point they were popular as a food item.
Ellen: Oh. Gross.
Christian: But that kind of died down as they found other turtles more suitable to being food, and also more aesthetically pleasing, I guess.
Ellen: Yeah. I feel like I wouldn't look at one of these and be like, mm, tasty. Good eats there.
Christian: Right?
Ellen: Gross.
Christian: So these guys, they can live up to 15 years in captivity. Their longevity in the wild has not been studied. And finally, their name, "matamata," is said to mean I kill in one of the South American native languages.
Ellen: Oh... I mean, yeah, it does do that. Sure. You know, I feel like when you look at them, they look a little bit more intimidating than I suppose they really are.
Christian: Yeah. I mean if you are a fish that could fit in its throat, definitely. But anything else, you're fine.
Ellen: Yeah. They look like, with how like spiky and jaggedy they look, they look like they might be able to do some damage to you. I feel like they look like a snapping turtle.
Christian: They do kind of, but again, their bites are really weak and that's not where they shine.
Ellen: Yeah. It's just, maybe that's a sort of mimicry where they want to look really tough and intimidating, but they're actually not.
Christian: So that's the matamata.
Ellen: That's a good turtle.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Good job! Well, before I get started on my animal, I want to take a quick a moment to thank our patrons on Patreon. We have a Patreon where you can get access to cool things like an ad-free version of the show, you can skip the commercials. We also have cool stuff like a patron-only discord server and we're going to be sending out really cool things like some photo prints of some animal photos that I've taken, so all sorts of cool stuff on the Patreon. For this week's episode, I want to thank our current sponsors, Briana Feinberg and Krystina Sanders. Thanks y'all.
Christian: Thank you.
Ellen: Yeah.
Christian: Okay. Ellen, what animal do you have for us this week?
Ellen: This week, I'm talking about a very popular animal that I think a lot of people are going to be excited to hear about: the emperor penguin.
Christian: Ah yes! Very good.
Ellen: Yes. This was requested by Taylor Gordon-Wood, who by the way did our cover art that you see everywhere that we exist. That really cute illustration with all the little animals on it and our cool logo, that was all Taylor. Thank you Taylor. So Taylor wanted to hear about the emperor penguin.
Christian: Alright.
Ellen: The scientific name for the emperor penguin is Aptenodytes forsteri, I completely made that pronunciation up, so don't @ me. I'm getting the information for the emperor penguin from the Australian Antarctic Division of the Australian government's Department of the Environment and Energy, and also the Smithsonian Institute. So to introduce you to the emperor penguin, this is the largest species of penguin. They're typically around four feet tall, or 1.2 meters.
Christian: That's pretty tall.
Ellen: Yes, this is a big penguin. And they are up to 40 kilograms, or 88 pounds.
Christian: Woah.
Ellen: Yes, heavier than most other birds. Usually when you hear of a bird, they could be that big, but they might only be like 20 pounds. Right? Because of how light they are? The penguin is much, much heavier than other birds, and I'm actually gonna talk about that in a minute here.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: You find these in Antarctica, which by the way is the South pole, not the North pole. A lot of times you'll see people making jokes about like Alaska or the Northern parts of Canada or Russia, like talking about there being penguins up there. They're not. They're on the other side of the world. Sorry.
Christian: They got polar bears, though.
Ellen: Polar bears, yes. But so also, a lot of times people joke about like penguins being eaten by polar bears or something. They live on complete opposite ends of the entire earth. So they don't live there.
Christian: I bet they would if they met, but...
Ellen: Yes, I'm sure a polar bear would not hesitate to eat a penguin- although, maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it would be like, "I don't know what that is" and leave it alone. Sometimes predators will do that. Sometimes predators will be like, "I don't, I don't know what I'm looking at" and they won't eat it.
Christian: This isn't chicken nuggets. I'm not eating that.
Ellen: Yeah, polar bears are a lot like my five year old that way. But so anyway, there are at least 17 different species of penguins. You'll see different numbers for the number of penguin species because some subspecies classifications are in question. So some places will consider different subspecies of the same species or some consider them their own thing, but at least 17 different distinct species of penguins.
Christian: Awesome.
Ellen: Yeah, the emperor penguin is one of two species in their genus that is known as great penguins. So the great penguins are the big boys. They're the emperor penguins and then the king penguins, which are very, very similar to emperor penguins, but they're much smaller. So the king penguin, therefore, is their closest relative, but there are many other different types of penguins. That's just kind of your primer on the emperor penguin. I'm going to get started with effectiveness as Christian did. For effectiveness. I give the emperor penguin an 8 out of 10.
Christian: Alright.
Ellen: So I want you to think of two primary goals that they have in mind. First of all being survival, and second of all being feeding. So living in Antarctica, the emperor penguin is naturally highly adapted to face really, really harsh conditions. So very, very low temperatures, very violent winds. They're kind of made for this. Look at how far they are removed from other birds. Their wings are adapted to function more like flippers than like traditional wings. So I saw something recently like, floating around on Twitter that says like a penguin might seem like a terribly made bird if you're thinking of it in terms of other birds, if you think of its wings more as flippers, they don't seem so bad.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: First of all, I want to talk about their feathers. A lot of people think that the penguins stay insulated from the cold by having dense feathers, by having lots and lots of feathers on their skin and just like the density of their feathers is what protects them. That's not how it is. That's not true. That's not how they work. There have been more recent studies in 2015 showing that it's not the case that their feathers are dense, it's just how many different types of feathers they have on their bodies. So their feathers are actually layered in different types. So there was a study by Cassondra Williams, Julie Hagelin and Gerald Kooyman published by the Royal Society on October 22nd of 2015 basically saying that penguins keep warm not by having a lot of feathers, but by having complex layers of different types of feathers. The outermost layer are contour feathers, these are similar to what we think of as flight feathers on other birds. These are the long, stiff feathers and these keep the penguin's body streamlined so it reduces drag in the water and also keep an outer sort of layer to keep cold water and keep cold temperatures out. Now when penguins preen, you see them using their beak to preen their feathers, what they're doing is they gather a hydrophobic oil that is actually produced by a gland on their body near their tail. This gland produces an oil that they gather up with their beak and then when they preen they spread that oil over their feathers, and it makes their feathers hydrophobic.
Christian: Neat!
Ellen: Yeah. So you can actually see, if you take a penguin feather, you can like drop water on it and the water just slides right off.
Christian: Nice.
Ellen: Yeah. So it's really, really good for when they dive down into the water to eat the fish to catch fish that they're trying to eat. It keeps the water from seeping in and making it to their skin. And also, that hydrophobic oil prevents their feathers from gathering ice.
Christian: Ah, that's important.
Ellen: Yeah, it's really, really important to not, you know, collect ice on your feathers and the hydrophobic oil keeps that from happening. Underneath the contour feathers are two different types of feathers. These are two different types of soft downy feathers. So there's afterfeathers, which are attached directly to the contour feathers, and then there's these things called plumules, which are actually attached to the skin. They're not connected to the contour feathers. So both of these are soft downy feathers, and the purpose of those is to trap air underneath the contour feathers and insulate the body and trap the warmth to keep the cold from permeating to the skin.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: So those are the afterfeathers and the plumules. And then there's also these other types of feathers called filoplumes.
Christian: Ooh!
Ellen: Yeah. So these are really, really tiny, tiny, tiny little skinny feathers. You almost need a microscope to see them. They're so, so, so small. And the purpose of these is actually sensory. So these feathers let the bird know if a feather is dislodged or like maybe it's gotten out of place and it needs to be fixed or preened, or they're basically saying, Hey, you need to check on this feather and make sure it's okay. Yeah, so it kind of is a sensor. It's like a little check engine light. Like, hey, check on this feather. It needs some needs, some rearranging.
Christian: That's pretty cool.
Ellen: Yeah, it's really cool! So basically people didn't know that there was so much going on with penguin feathers until very, very recently. So I kind of read the whole thing and thought it was really interesting, that they have all these crazy different types of feathers that basically all work together to make sure that the penguin stays dry and warm.
Christian: That's awesome.
Ellen: Yeah. So the next thing I want to talk about other than their feathers is their bones. Since penguins don't fly, they don't have to worry about having those hollow, lightweight bones that other birds do.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: Right, so other birds have bones that are full of these air bubbles that keeps them light enough to fly. Penguins don't fly, so they don't have to worry about that. So compared to other birds, their bones are solid and dense. This serves a few different purposes. First of all, it allows them to develop really, really strong chest and shoulder muscles. They need much stronger chest and shoulder muscles than other birds because they have to generate thrust in the water, and the water is much thicker than air, so they have to push a lot harder.
Christian: Makes sense.
Ellen: Yeah. So they have just really, really thick muscles there. But another purpose of the solid bones is that it helps protect them from the effects of barotrauma, which we talked about in the blobfish episode.
Christian: That's right.
Ellen: In the blobfish episode, we talked about baro trauma being the negative effects that the change in pressure can have when you dive down into the water where the pressure is very high, and then you come back up where the pressure is very, very low. So penguins also have to dive down really deep in the water to catch fish, to hunt, to do all that stuff that they need to do, they have to dive down. So having thicker, more solid bones helps prevent them from developing barotrauma when they come back up.
Christian: Interesting.
Ellen: Yeah, so few different purposes, but so it's very lucky that they have those thick bones rather than the hollow bird bones.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: So another thing that they have to worry about is heat and energy retention, which they solve by having these fat deposits all over their body. They have just lots and lots and lots of fat built up on their body. You can see this when you look at their body and you see how chunky they are, they're nice and thick. So they have these deposits all over their body as well as on their feet. So their feet actually have fat on them, and that keeps their feet from freezing on the ice.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Yeah, so that also lets them store and conserve energy because during the winters they have to go for months at a time without food.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: So they have all of these fat deposits on their body to store energy. They also have really small extremities, like their beacon, their wings, which are really thin, so they don't have to let as much heat away from their body. They don't have to let as much heat flow outward. Just some ways that they store heat in their bodies. The last thing for their effectiveness I want to talk about was their countershading. We talk about this a lot with animals that live in the ocean. They have the white tummy and then the black on their back. And that makes them difficult to spot when you're underneath them and looking up, you see white that blends in with the sky, but when you're above them looking down, you see black that blends in with the ocean.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Yeah. So this is a really, really common coloring palette you'll see with animals that do swim a lot on the ocean. So just another thing that penguins have that help keep them safe when they're out swimming around in the water. I did deduct a couple of points for them being very vulnerable with no real method of self-defense. You know, they have like a pointy beak and they have sharp claws, but the claws are made more for gripping on the ice and they don't have a lot of mobility with them, so they can't do anything with them really. So in the water, they're pretty much easy pickings for leopard seals and orca whales. So both of those swim much faster than penguins.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: I mean penguins can get some good speed going, but I mean it's nothing compared to the predators they're up against in the water. So, I took a little bit off there cause they don't really have good ways of defending themselves against their predators.
Christian: Right. You'll see lots of videos of them trying to escape those predators, primarily by just getting on top of ice floats and...
Ellen: Yes, so their kind of best bet there is to hop on top of ice and get on top of land, which they have to get on top of a really large chunk of land to be safe because you know like, orca whales and leopard seals are smart enough to be able to tip the ice and knock the penguins off.
Christian: Well, the seal can also get on top of there too, if it wants to.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. So I dunno, I took a couple of points off cause they don't really have a backup plan there.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: Moving onto their ingenuity, I gave them an 8 out of 10.
Christian: Oh!
Ellen: They are clever birds, mostly in their social interactions. Emperor penguins spend most of most of their time in the water, but they have to breed on the ice during the winter and they have to do it during the winter because that's when the ice is the thickest so that it's strong enough to support the whole colony of penguins, right? They're so heavy and there's so many of them that in order for them to all get on top of the ice without the ice breaking, it has to be during the time of year when the ice is going to be thick enough to hold them, which means that they have to be on the ice out of the water during the harshest part of the year.
Christian: Ah.
Ellen: This is the time when it's coldest. The winds are strongest. It's just really uninviting. They survive this winter by huddling. If you've seen Happy Feet or March of the Penguins, you have- you probably have an idea of what this huddle looks like. It's mostly males. The adult male emperor penguins will huddle together where they sort of overlap each other. They sort of lay on top of each other in this massive- hundreds, even thousands of penguins all huddled together in this giant mass and they're tightly packed together, right?
Christian: Right.
Ellen: They're not just standing near each other, they are fully laying on top of each other. So in this colony that is huddling together, individuals, will actually rotate out of and into the center of the huddle. So they're taking turns on the outside edges of the huddle because that's where the winds are really harsh, that's where the conditions are a lot worse. So they actually take turns warming themselves in the middle, making sure that no penguin has to be on the outside for too long.
Christian: Oh, that's good!
Ellen: Yeah, they will also, if there's like a particularly windy day going on or something, the penguins that are on the sides that are facing the wind, they'll do this really interesting thing where they shuffle along the outside of the huddle around to the opposite side and then the rest of the penguins will follow in single file forming this circular procession around the edge to make sure that no penguin has to be in the brunt of the wind for too long. Yeah, so it kind of spiraling out to make sure that every penguin has a turn in the middle where it's nice and warm.
Christian: Awww.
Ellen: Yeah. It's just really cool, and then when they're in this huddle, they almost move as though they're just one giant penguin. You can see all these videos online of sped up penguin huddles where they all move together in these tiny little steps where they all shuffle forward together at the same time to move the entire huddle. It's really crazy to watch, but they do kind of form this hivemind penguin.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: It's like, we are one penguin
Christian: Now, this is also in a part of the globe where when you're close enough to the poles and it's the winter for that hemisphere, you might be in an area that won't see the sun for a long time.
Ellen: Oh gosh, yeah. Typically in these huddles, what you're seeing are the adult males, and the adult males are in this huddle because they have been left behind by the females. The females have met up with them when the breeding season was starting, which is typically the end of the autumn season leading into the winter. The females will meet up with them, they will mate, the female will lay her egg, she will give it to the male, and then when winter starts to really get rough, the females peace out and they leave. The males stay behind in their huddle with the egg. The male is holding onto the egg, he's holding it in a little what's called a brood pouch, which is a little flap of skin he's got underneath his tummy.
Christian: Aw.
Ellen: He puts the egg under there, so he's holding onto it with his feet and he's got his belly kind of on top of the egg, keeping it warm. The females leave and they leave for months at a time and they go back to the ocean and they feed, so they're hunting and eating. They fill their tummies up and then the males stay behind in the huddle to brave the storm. They have to stay there, right, because the egg is not going to survive in that winter. They can't do anything else with it. They can't leave it at a nest because it's going to freeze. So they have to stay there and wait.
Christian: Protect it with their dad bod.
Ellen: And protect it with their ultimate dad bod that is specifically made for protecting their babies. So they stay there for months at a time. They can't eat anything this whole time, and we're talking like two or three months at a time where they just cannot eat anything. They have to just sit there and wait. So during that time they're just warming the egg, trying to stay alive, and then after a few months the female comes home, mommy comes home, she's got a belly full of food and if by then the chick has hatched, then she will take the chick back from the dad and she'll feed it and the dad will leave and go eat his food. If she comes back and the egg hasn't hatched yet, then she'll just take the egg and the dad will go get something to eat. So they'll trade off like that. The dad will give the baby to the mom, he'll go eat. But then he comes back and they keep doing that. They keep trading off so that one of them can go eat and then come back. So they're both still raising the chick, which is really cool. You're seeing like both parents kind of taking on an equal role in raising the baby.
Christian: Soooo what happens when one doesn't come back?
Ellen: That happens. Sometimes one of them, like either the mom doesn't come back or the dad doesn't come back, and if it is that sort of situation where maybe the mom or the dad has been killed, maybe they've been eaten by a whale or maybe they've just decided to move on and do something else, then the parent will, if they get desperate enough, they'll abandon the chick and go eat. Like they have to- they have to stay alive.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: So they will leave their chick to go feed if they have to. Yeah, so that does happen sometimes, although the chicks will form their own huddle once they kind of get big enough where they can leave their parents' pouch, they will form their own little huddle and sometimes actually other penguins will adopt abandoned chicks.
Christian: Awww.
Ellen: Yeah, that- actually I was about to talk about this.
Christian: Oh!
Ellen: Yes. So, so dedicated our penguin fathers that there are many cases of male penguins forming couples and adopting abandoned eggs or chicks. This is actually very like, highly documented in captivity usually because people find it adorable and lose their minds about it because it's so cute. So I haven't, I actually wasn't able to confirm that any of these were emperor penguins. I found a couple of examples of king penguins, being their closest relatives. So Skipper and Ping were a pair of male king penguins at the Berlin Zoo who tried to incubate and hatch rocks and fish.
Christian: Awww...
Ellen: Yeah. They so badly wanted to hatch their own egg that they would find rocks and incubate them and like, try to hatch... Rocks. Yeah. So they wanted so badly to have their own baby that they were given an egg that had been laid and abandoned by its mother. So the zookeepers saw a mother lay an egg and she walked away from it, so they gave the egg to Skipper and Ping. The egg ended up not being fertilized, so it never hatched, but the zookeepers say they're going to keep trying. They'll try again next season that like, if another egg is abandoned, they'll give it to Skipper and Ping and let them try again.
Christian: How nice.
Ellen: Yeah. Another pair of male king penguins at the Odense Zoo in Denmark saw a chick left unattended, assumed it was abandoned by its parents, and adopted it as their own. When the parents returned for their chick, they were not pleased. So they got in a little fight, they got in a little penguin altercation and staff had to like, break them up and they did return the check to the original parents. But what happened was these two male penguins really wanted to have a chick of their own and they basically saw like, this chick that their parent just went to go, I dunno, swim or eat or something, and they were like, "Oh! Must be abandoned!" And like, just took it and left. So yeah, that was...
Christian: Swipe.
Ellen: Yeah. So they- the zookeepers there did say that they were going to try to get that chick- get those penguins their own chick too. And then of course the famous penguin couple, Roy and Silo. These were chinstrap penguins, so these are different entirely from emperor and king penguins, but these were chinstrap penguins who nested together as a couple for six consecutive years.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: Yeah. And they eventually raised a chick, a female chick, her name was Tango, they raised her together and she inspired the children's book "And Tango Makes Three," about Roy and Silo and their baby chick Tango.
Christian: How cute!
Ellen: Yes, it's very sweet. There is this misconception floating around that we actually, just like an hour ago were talking about in the Facebook group, there is this misconception that penguins mate monogamously forever. A lot of people have this idea that penguins mate for life. That's not really how it works. So they engage in what's called serial monogamy, where they will have one partner for that mating season. So they'll have one partner that they stay with for that year, but then the next breeding season, a lot of times they will go back to the same partner, but they will often find another partner for the next season. Now, different species of penguins have different what they call divorce rates.
Christian: Oh no.
Ellen: Yeah. So for example, actually the emperor penguin, I saw their figures said that 80% of emperor penguins found a new partner with like, the next breeding season. So they're not as successfully monogamous as other species of penguins, like other species, it's much, much lower, it's like 30 or 40% so they actually are more likely to go back to the same partner over and over again. But it's not true that they stay with just one partner for the rest of their lives. That's not how they work.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Yeah. So I just wanted to get that out there. So the last thing I want to talk about for their ingenuity is that penguins identify each other to either reunite with their mates at breeding seasons, or when they come back from hunting, they need to find their family and get back to their chick. They can identify each other by these unique vocalizations. Yeah. So even in these massive colonies of thousands and thousands of penguins, they can pick out the one particular penguin they're looking for because they can tell their voices apart.
Christian: That's good.
Ellen: Happy Feet was like surprisingly accurate. How like, they identify each other by their voice and like the song that they sing is like unique to them. That's like surprisingly dead on.
Christian: But then Elijah Wood couldn't sing!
Ellen: No, he did a bad job.
Christian: He had to do the dance.
Ellen: He danced instead. But like that was a lot of things in Happy Feet were like surprisingly accurate. Like that part in the beginning where like the skua is like, diving down and trying to take the egg and the babies and stuff. That's true. That happens.
Christian: And then they did all those Queen songs.
Ellen: They did all the Queen songs and it was great. Happy Feet's a great movie. So that wraps things up for my 8 out of 10 for ingenuity, I thought they were pretty good. They have really good social interactions and that's...
Christian: Very good.
Ellen: Pretty cool. So for aesthetics, I gave them two different scores. For the adults, I give them 6 out of 10. I think they have a goofy-shaped body where they are very thick in the middle, but they're kinda like tapered at the ends?
Christian: I'm trying to think if I'm imagining the correct penguin.
Ellen: The emperor penguin is the one from Happy Feet. It's really tall now. I do, I will say that they have a very aesthetically pleasing color palette where they're mostly black and white. Their back has this sort of gradient where it's black at the bottom and it up towards the top. It's like a gray scale sort of ombre look that I think is really, really pretty, and then they have these splashes of yellow around like their face. They'll have these bright, bright, bright yellow splashes on their face and on their beak and stuff.
Christian: I see.
Ellen: So I think their colors are really pretty, but I actually don't think that the adult emperor penguin is very... Cute. They have the little eyes and... I don't know. I'm not a huge stan of the adult emperor penguin. Now, part two of my aesthetic score, the babies. 10 out of 10. Oh my gosh. It's literally just a little pointy cloud. That's all it is. It's just a little, it's just a little fluff that has a tiny beak and tiny eyes and it's just so cute I can't stand it. So number one, cutest baby animal in the world, but it grows up to be... You know, those like bowling pin shaped like toys that's like, you knock them over and then they pop back up? It's a bit what they look like.
Christian: Are you talking about Weeble Wobbles?
Ellen: Yes. That's kind of what they look like. So yeah. Um...
Christian: I bet they do fall down, though.
Ellen: I just find it hard to take them seriously with the way that they look. But yeah. So those are my two different aesthetic scores for the emperor penguin.
Christian: Very good.
Ellen: Yeah. So to wrap things up, their conservation status is near threatened. So emperor penguins are directly affected by changes to ocean temperatures, since they need massive amounts of sea ice in order to breed and raise their chicks. So as ice in Antarctica is continuing to decrease as severely as it has in recent years, penguins are having less and less space to start their families and their populations are declining. So you can help us protect penguins by you know, supporting environmental protection measures. I know there's been a lot in the news about the climate strike and all that stuff, so you know, follow that and, and do what you can to make our oceans better and protect penguins.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: That's all I got. That wraps things up for the emperor penguin for me.
Christian: Very good! Very interesting birb.
Ellen: Definitely a very cool bird to learn about. I guess to wrap things up for this episode, we have a couple of audience responses. I'll go first because mine is actually not a response. It was way back. So last week we talked about the bombardier beetle. You did. So Jungle Gym Queen was one of the people who requested the bombardier beetle, and I totally forgot to say this (or I forgot to pass this on to you), but in the Twitter thread where they requested the Bombardier beetle, they had this really delightful description of the bombardier beetle that I wanted to include.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Called bombardier beetles "chitinous incarnations of people after eating sugar-free Haribo gummy bears."
Christian: [laughs].
Ellen: And I really found that on point. I thought you would like to hear that and I neglected to mention it last episode, so I wanted to make sure we got that in there.
Christian: Excellent.
Ellen: Yep. It's all you babe.
Christian: Alright. I have a response from Melody Albright, who is one of our listeners on the Facebook page. So for last week's episode with the bombardier beetle, I reached out to Melody because she's been very active in the Facebook group and has a lot of knowledge about insects. So I asked her, you know, what are some interesting things about the bombardier beetle? And then she actually reached out to her friend Evan Waite, who recently got his Master's in Science while studying beetles.
Ellen: Wow!
Christian: Yeah. Evan says the coolest fact, in his opinion, is that the chemical compounds that make the explosion are held in two separate chambers, when released, they combine to cause the reaction. So that's what we were talking about last week, in the explosion chamber.
Ellen: Yes. The dramatically named explosion chamber.
Christian: So, again, we thought that was all very interesting because it's able to do that without blowing up itself.
Ellen: I always feel like, on some level, bugs are just little robots and I think this one's a battle bot.
Christian: Long range. Medium range? I don't know.
Ellen: I mean as far as bugs go, it's pretty long range. Most of them don't have that kind of reach. All right, well that's all we have for this week so thank you so much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it and thank you very much to everyone who has been reviewing us on your podcatchers and letting your friends know about us. We really appreciate that. We've been seeing some really cool growth and it makes us really happy. You can connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Just search the title of the show and you'll get there. Please come hang out with us in our Facebook group, which rules. Our Facebook group is so good. You guys make me so happy. It is called Just the Zoo of Us: Official Friend Squad, so come hang out with us on there and come be our friend. If you have an animal species that you want to hear us review, you can submit those to us. My email address is ellen@justthezooofus.com, or of course you can hit us up on social media. It'll get where it needs to go,
Christian: But also, also send us things you don't want us to review. I probably won't do anything with that information.
Ellen: If this is your first time joining us, if you scroll down a little bit in our feed, you'll see some of the monstrosities that Christian has brought to the table and subjected me to, because I have to sit here and listen to him talk about it every time, and then I have to edit the episode, which means I have to listen to it all over again, and then I have to do the transcript, which means I have to listen to it three times. I had to hear you talk about the botfly.
Christian: And see it in text form.
Ellen: THREE times I had to listen to that, and I had to type it out.
Christian: There it is.
Ellen: So, thank you so much for doing that to me.
Christian: Anytime.
Ellen: Like I said, the transcript of this episode and other episodes can be found at justthezooofus.com and our last note is that I'd like to thank Louie Zong for the use of his song "Adventuring" off of his album, Bee Sides.
Christian: Yes. Thank you for that. It slaps real hard.
Ellen: Okay bye.
Christian: Bye y'all.