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How do Penguins Hunt?
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Nov 22, 2019 · Penguins – flightless marine birds mostly found in the Southern Hemisphere – primarily feed on small fish, krill and squid. Penguin hunting behavior ranges from seafloor foraging to open-ocean diving, and includes both solitary and group hunting.
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- Overview
- Smarts of the Penguins
- Master navigators
Penguins are master navigators, proving they're as clever as they are cute.
Penguins are certainly charismatic.
Their striking appearance and jaunty waddles spark endless fascination among wildlife watchers and zoogoers alike. Documentary films like March of the Penguins have captivated audiences around the world.
But Twitter user @CheungEdwin909 wants to know if penguins are as clever as they are cute. Do penguins have the same smarts and good memories as other birds like ravens and crows, he asks? (Read more about crow and raven intelligence.)
Intelligence doesn’t just mean cleverness, says David Powell, Director of Research at the St. Louis Zoo. When assessing intelligence, he says, it’s important to test abilities that are “actually meaningful to the animal,” like hunting and navigation.
Penguin cognition is not quite as well documented as that of parrots or corvids (crows, ravens, and magpies, for example), which have been formally studied for years, says Anne Tieber, Curator of Birds at the St. Louis Zoo. But their intelligence can be compared to corvids in several ways, she says.
For example, penguins hunt cooperatively, just like brown-necked ravens. African penguins, which live around the southern tip of Africa, cooperate to herd fish, driving them towards the surface for easy pickings. It’s a method almost three times more efficient than group-hunting a single fish, according to a study published in Royal Society Open Science.
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Penguins (Cutely) Count Selves
Microchip-implanted penguins in Argentina are helping scientists by just doing what comes naturally on the birds' favorite "highway" to the sea.
Like crows, which can remember particular human faces for years, many penguin species have remarkable memories. (Read about how crows react to the deaths of their comrades.)
Many penguin species, including Adelie and Chinstrap, return to the same nest spot each year and have to be able to find it in colonies where there may be thousands of other birds. This is a feat that combines both memory and navigation, Powell says.
Even at 10 months old, king penguin chicks can find their way back to a square-meter space in a huge colony from a third of a mile away. The birds use visual cues like lakes and hills as well as sounds of the colony to guide themselves home.
King penguins, which are monogamous during mating season, can recognize their partners’ call, even in noisy colonies where hundreds of penguins are searching for their own mates.
The ability to filter out extraneous noise and home in on only what you need to hear is a trait that at least three species of penguins share with humans. This phenomenon of being in a noisy crowd but being able to hear your friend’s voice through the din is known as the “the cocktail party effect.”
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Penguins have the ability to forage for food in the sub-temperature waters of the Antarctic, where Krill and other sea life have also found a home.
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- BBC Earth
Penguins employ diverse hunting strategies to secure their food supply, showcasing adaptability in their foraging behavior within their rookeries. Stealth, speed, and ambush are some of the hunting techniques that penguins employ, each tailored to their specific hunting needs.
Penguins are an important part of the food chain, as a range of predators (including leopard seals, orcas, and seabirds in cold climates, and pumas, mongooses, and crabs in hot climates) hunt penguin eggs, chicks, and mature adults for food.
Nov 15, 2019 · In this case, food is found in the ocean, which is the penguins' main habitat. Adult penguins dine on several animals from the ocean, but mainly fish, squid, and crustaceans, like krill or rock crabs.
May 30, 2019 · In 2011, the penguins changed their diet to eat a large percentage of Cape horse mackerel, which has a lower energy content than anchovy. The foraging behaviour of the African penguins...
