Ologies with Alie Ward - Penguinology (PENGUINS) with Tom Hart

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Do penguins have flippers or wings? Why do they waddle? Do they really mate for life? What’s up with pebble gifts? Are they squishy or dense? And why why why are they so cute? April 25th is World Penguin Day and there’s never been a better time to sit down with renown Penguinologist Dr. Tom Hart, a research fellow with Oxford University. We chat all about life on Antarctica, how he counts colonies, how you can help him count colonies, what penguins smell like, behaviors he’s witnessed, and why he does NOT find penguins cute. Rather he sees them as stoic, badass, majestic and worthy of our respect. Also, which penguins are jackasses. Hint: it’s not jackass penguins. Dr. Hart is your new favorite penguinologist. Follow Penguin Watch at Twitter.com/penguin_watch and Instagram.com/penguin_watch Help count penguins -- for science! At PenguinWatch.org Donations went to TRASS for mangrove planting and to PenguinWatch.org More links at alieward.com/ologies/penguinology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, it's your internet dad who just learned how to mute her mic on Zoom. A Hollywood. Back with a shiny new episode of oligies, this one's coming out on April 21st. Do you know what week it is? Y'all, it is World Penguin Week. That's not true. April 25th is World Penguin Day. There's no such thing as World Penguin Week, but I'm declaring it a week.

World Penguin Week, welcome to it. But before we get to the fanfare and all the fun facts, a few thanks to everyone on patreon.com slash oligies for supporting the show. Thank you to everyone tagging their merch photos, oligies merch so we can repost them. Thank you to everyone who has rated and subscribed on Apple Podcasts and all the other platforms, especially those leaving reviews to buoy the bad days such as Sailor Thought, who says, weirdly meditative listening. I've been listening to oligies for quite some time, but quarantine has made me appreciate

this beautiful podcast more than ever. I listen to old episodes every single night to help me turn my anxiety off. Thank you, Edward. Welcome, Sailor Thought. Let's get to some penguins. Let's get them in your ears, in your brains, in your hearts. Penguinology, it's a real thing. It has been for years.

We'll discuss shortly. So I became aware of this ology after approximately one million of you tweeted me a photo of this oligist maybe a year and a half ago with the Chiron, which is the graphic at the lower third of the TV screen that says who someone is. And this oligist identified on the BBC as a penguin oligist. Oh. Who better to call it that than one of the world's foremost penguin experts? He's legit.

Penguinology is thus legit. So we have been in touch for months and months, but I had to wait for him to be in not Antarctica. And then we hopped on the phone, he from the UK, where it was evening and he was settling in to relax and get barraged with idiot questions from me, your stupid podcast toast. So he is a research fellow at Oxford University's Zoological Department. He spent well over a decade working and studying and very gently spying on penguins and heads up penguinwatch.org, where you yourself can go and see wonderful penguins in remote regions on planet Earth.

You can join 11,000 volunteers who help scientists, including him, count penguins just by looking at pictures of penguins and just putting a dot on the penguins. It's so good. And quick audio note. If you hear any clickety clacking, that is just the keyboard in my shared home office with Jared. So just consider it like an ASMR treat. Okay?

Great. Okay. So we talked about what it's like working on the ends of the Earth and how cold it is and what exactly is a penguin and how do they stay warm and mating habits and weird knees and bad parents and neck facts and diets and swimming and waddling and poo and you and how you can help out our feathered friends. So observe this World Penguin Week by slipping on a tux and sliding down the ice to join us for one of the most anticipated episodes of ologies maybe ever with penguinologist

Dr. Tom Hart. Okay. It looks like we're off sync, but I swear it'll work in the audio. Okay. We're in business. Dr. Tom Hart, you're a penguinologist. Yes. This is so thrilling.

I'm not sure if you understand how thrilling this is. You are perhaps like the best person to ask about penguins, but also you're the best person to have an ologies because you are a self-titled penguinologist. Absolutely. Sort of. Yeah. What was the moment that you decided that your lower third should say penguinologist? I'm a bit unnerved by you calling it my lower third.

That sounds a bit invasive, but it was a BBC interview on Emperor Penguins and I think I've been calling myself that for a few years and it's half joke, but it's informative. It just tells people what you do. So the whole point is they usually laugh and then they ask why what and at that point you've got people. So it's the most honest ologist in that it's not everything I do. It could be anything from model or molecular biology to ecologist or behaviorist, but largely when I'm talking about penguins and particularly when I'm trying to conserve them, it makes

sense to just say I'm a penguinologist. People know exactly what it is and it is a little bit of a joke, but at the same time when people have kind of fought me on it, I push back twice as hard because it is transparent and that's what we should be doing. Do you have other academics who are penguin researchers tell you that that's not protocol? I've had a few turn their noses up, but largely no, I think people are coming around. I mean, it makes the point and actually through both outreach and engagement, I've been able to do a lot.

So I think any early cynicism is fading now. I mean, you're here with us now and would you have been... And that is the pinnacle, that's the absolute pinnacle of mercury. Dr. Tom Hart is a globally celebrated expert on seabirds, having been an author on paper such as high coverage genomes to elucidate the evolution of penguins and divergent trophic responses of sympatic penguin species to historic anthropogenic exploitation and recent climate change. One of those things, let's be honest, pale when compared to watching me fumble through

my abject penguin ignorance over Skype, I'm sure. So where did it all start? When did you start liking birds and zoology and conservation? Oh, very early on. I think anytime from about age 10, I probably wanted to be a marine biologist. I definitely like biology and I like the marine environment and so it was that or lifeboat crew or something like that. But yeah, it's no surprise to 10-year-old me, who's pretty chuffed with it, it's kind

of no surprise and yet at the same time, it could have been a lot of other things that make a difference and conservation related. Did you always want to go on remote expeditions as part of your work or did it just so happen that penguins was an area that you kind of gravitated toward or that needed your working on it? I definitely wanted to go remote, but again, the exact ending up in Antarctica is a mild surprise because you're not told as a kid that it's possible, I mean, you're told the standard jobs and no one ever mentioned this and actually really almost any job in science

or a lot of them, if you're doing it right, you're inventing a new job that didn't exist for the previous generation because you're trying to push boundaries. So to some degree, that's fair, but at the same time, yeah, no one told me that as a kid that I should be looking to work in Antarctica or even that it was possible. How many times have you been to Antarctica for your work? I haven't a clue. Yeah, okay, so that many. Yeah, I genuinely don't know, but I think it's something like 13 seasons worth over

about 15 years, so I've missed a couple of seasons since I started. What was it like the first time you went? Genuinely life-changing because, yeah, it's life-changing in the sense that it's like saying wonders of the world, knowing that it's changing, it's very eye-opening to put things in global context as well as being personally very rewarding. So yes, it's definitely, I think, awe-inspiring, awesome, they're overused, but life-changing in the sense that you know there and then your life is not going to be the same. Absolutely.

A few of the places he commutes to for work are the Sandwich Islands and South Georgia, which are little tiny specks, no bigger than 100 miles long, way off the coast of Argentina, just above the continent of Antarctica. Now, Antarctica, the continent, who even owns it, I asked Google for us. Well, it was air quotes discovered only about 100 years ago, doesn't really belong to anyone. It's likened to a condominium, politically, with different countries having jurisdiction and putting research stations there, and there was a 1959 Antarctic Treaty, it essentially said, hey, nobody owns this, okay.

Now parts of Antarctica, how cold can they get? With 89 degrees Celsius, that's negative 128 Fahrenheit, and it's a polar desert. It's blustery. It's cold. It's white. It's icy. It's pristine. It's gorgeous.

Now in terms of critters, you got your orcas, you got some seals, some albatross, you got some shrimpy little krill munchies in the water, and of course, penguins. Now for Tom, why penguins? It wasn't really penguins. It was studying the Southern Ocean and trying to conserve it. So if anything, I was attracted to the Antarctic Treaty, and the idea that no one owned Antarctica and that if you could show what the problem was, they had to fix it, that's a little bit naive with the politics of it, but it's still somewhat true.

This is a place where knowledge can make a real difference. Antarctica's weird, and I'm kind of distinguished between Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, so a lot of Antarctica is different from the stereotype of just cold, white, and windy. I mean, that's definitely true, but it's incredibly diverse. No one goes to Antarctica knowing what it's like, because although you've seen it on the telly, it's vastly different from that, and so everyone goes to Antarctica with some kind of story about how they got there, but at the same time, no one knows what it's like until they're there.

What is it like going to study penguins? Like does a guy with a pipe and a wiry beard drop you off of a research vessel, just like, later suckers, see you in three months? In a word, no. It would be a bad season for us if we ended up in the same place for three months. So we want to hit as many sites as possible, and that's how we change data and knowledge about Antarctica is by, to a lot of sense, going to a lot of different sites for very little and leaving things like time-lapse cameras in there in place for a whole year

that record a whole year with us only there maybe for three hours. So yeah, now we do still go places and camp, but largely it's, we're getting dropped off somewhere for a few hours or a couple of days, and then we moved on. Oh, it's like a very adventurous science cruise, a cruise ship. Yeah. See you a couple of hours. Well, I mean, we hitchhike on tour ships all the time. I mean, that's how.

Do you really? Yeah, that's how we do a lot of our work. I mean, that's, it's no joke, it's the most efficient way we can work. A tour ship will drop you off usually near penguins because they want people to see them for a few hours. And then they, while they're maneuvering somewhere else, you're having lunch, then you sleep, you know, you, you wake up and do it again. It's an incredibly efficient way to get around an enormous number of penguin colonies.

Can I have a ride? Yeah, hitchhiking is how we've been able to do so much. So we, we've got a major benefactor called quark expeditions. They're incredible with us. But equally, you know, we have phoned people up out of the blue saying, I gather you're going somewhere interesting. Hello on Tom. Hart, Dr. Tom Hart, penguinologist.

And. Oh my God. Usually they give us a space. And now when you're talking about these colonies, how many penguins are we talking and what species? Tell me about these penguins. As someone who has never seen a penguin outside of a zoo. Why not?

Why have I not? Yeah. It's a great question. I live in LA. Not a lot of penguins here. Other than zoo penguins, which Tom says just aren't the same. No, wild penguins are, are impressive because of the numbers of colon, you know, the numbers in a colony and seeing them in a, in a natural habitat is totally different.

So fix that, please. That's. Okay. I will. I'll hitchhike. What is it? What is a colony? Like how many will, will kind of coalesce together?

How many? It entirely just depends on the species and where you are. So, um, so in Antarctica on the kind of mainland continent of Antarctica, the colonies are actually often quite a lot smaller. So, um, gentoo penguins are dailies there. They're often in colonies of about three, five thousand with a few exceptions. So when you get into the Rossi, they, they can be a lot bigger. They might be, um, several hundred thousand.

Emperor penguins on sea ice, they're a very varied, but yeah, it could be anything from a couple of thousand to again, a hundred thousand. So a colony could be as populous as the city of Boulder, Colorado, or even Vacaville or West Covina. Hi, West Covina. The largest colonies on earth are in the South sandwich islands and those are, well, they, they were, we haven't finished counting them recently, but they were one point three million pairs and that's a lot of penguins.

And are you using drones and mathematical calculations to figure out how many are in these huge colonies? Yeah. Everything we do is a mixture of, I mean, we're always trying to push the tech to get something. I mean, we're basically always playing catch up. These colonies are too big, they're understudied and we want the answer fast enough to do something about usually declines.

So yeah, the, the big thing is time-lapse cameras. So that records, you know, a year in the life of a colony and as many images as we can get, we want to process. So if we can take a photo every hour, we get the timing of breeding and success and things like that. If we can take a photo every minute during breeding season, then we get feeding behavior, foraging and all of that stuff, which is like, you know, has not been possible on, on the scale we're talking about of hundreds of colonies simultaneously.

So yeah, we need a mixture of citizen science and machine learning. So we need all the kind of AI tools and crowdsourcing if we're ever going to do this. But yeah, we're always pushing. It's things like drones with collaborators, it's satellite imagery. Let's pack up a minute. Let's just waddle on backwards. And now, basic stupid questions about penguins. What exactly makes a bird a penguin?

Well, common ancestry, I mean, they're, they're monophiletic, which means they, they evolved once and then everything else is diversified within them. Oh, so it's thought that penguins diverged from the ancestors of albatrosses and petrels 71 million years ago. What is a petrol? You're asking? It's a good question. I didn't know.

It's a tube-nosed short-winged seabird. And if you squint at a picture of a petrol, you can kind of see their resemblance to a penguin. It's kind of like looking at two brothers with wildly different haircuts and one of them can fly. But penguins, penguins, you are great swimmers. This is not a contest. What makes them a penguin in terms of, if you're going to describe a mix, quite a large seabird, the seabirds tend to be larger on average than, than other birds. But large, they don't have hollow bones.

So they've, by giving up the ability to fly, they've become a lot more, a lot better adapted at diving and swimming. That's also allowed their feathers to change. So those are more about hydrodynamics and insulation, obviously. Yeah, there's a lot of cold adaptations. Both anatomically and behaviorally as well. But one of the big things that people forget is just starvation tolerant. I mean, they, you think of the emperor penguins, the, the males that are incubating

a chick, an egg and then a chick for about three, four months. That's, that's a lot of it. So any other species, they molt all at the same time. So flying birds, they molt several feathers at a time so that they can still fly. So a few weeks ago, in case you missed this, we covered it in plumology, but flying birds will lose a flight feather from one side and then the other. That way they can keep balance. And some species like parrots and pelicans, it can take them up to two years

to replace all those ding-dong feathers. But not penguins. Penguins are your friends who cannonball into a pool instead of dipping a toe in. They are right or die all at once. Let's do this. Penguins all have this catastrophic molt where they, they then go to sea for a week or so, feed up as much as they can, and then they stand in one place looking grumpy, losing all of their feathers before the winter.

Oh, what is the evolutionary advantage of doing it all at once? I'm not sure, but I think it's so that I think it's so they don't lose foraging efficiency when they're breeding and then because they can't do it over winter, they need, I mean, they want to go into winter with peak condition for their feathers. And what are some behaviors in penguins that are so different? Like, what are some of the behaviors that are so endearing about penguins or that are, that are shitty, make them fat, fat people? I mean, do we have to call it endearing?

I think they're awesome. No, we don't. They deserve our respect. Okay. I mean, the ones everyone knows about is the one, the one a lot of people think of is huddling in, in emperors, but that really is almost only in emperors for the breeding. King penguins that look very similar, but are in the subantarctic in places

like South Georgia, they, they also huddle over winter, but only the chicks. So the chicks get left behind and you see these massive aggregations of chicks huddling to keep warm. So mostly it's the thing that's found in chicks rather than, rather than the adults and it's a mixture of trying to avoid big predators pecking at you as well as to stay warm. Come on. A bunch of fuzzy ground birds in tuxedos having an icy cuddle party.

Let me have this. Also, a quick who's who of penguins. Are you ready for this? There are 17 to 20 different species. And my understanding is that there are more than 20 penguinologists who disagree about subspecies. But either way, on the shores of Antarctica, we have emperor penguins. These are the big guys three to four feet tall.

They have this sheen of golden yellow on their face and chest. And then there are smaller, a daily penguins, which have very simple curved lines that black and white, a daily penguins look like mid century, modern of penguin design, very simple, so elegant. King penguins look like smaller emperor penguins. And they're in the northern reaches of Antarctica and the Falkland Islands. And chinstrap penguins, they look like they're sporting a little black bike helmet. They live on the islands in the Scotia Sea.

Gentoo's are on the Antarctic Peninsula and the nearby islands. And they're the ones with the orange feet and a matching orange bill. Gentoo's are like those ladies with nice shoes and handbags that go together. Crested penguins, those are the ones with the bananas, yellowish, spiky things near their eyes. They have a very speak to the manager haircut. And they include rock hoppers and macaroni penguins named not for the pasta, but for the flamboyant men's fashion style of macaronism of the 1700s. So fabulous.

Now, there are banded penguins, which have kind of a racing stripe around their bellies. Those are in South America and South Africa. They include the jackass. There are yellow eyed penguins in New Zealand and the sub-anarctic islands. And finally, finally, little penguins, those are on the southern Australia coast in New Zealand, and they have a bluish tint to their feathers and they're teeny just over a foot tall. Maybe three apples high and blue.

Motion to call them Smurf penguins. Overrode. All right. Also, 37 million years ago, there was a colossus penguin which stood six feet eight inches tall. The same height as LeBron James. So if you take nothing else fromologies as a podcast, just know that at one point on planet Earth, there were groups that look like entire NBA basketball leagues consisting only of ginormous as penguins.

The movement around the colony is phenomenal. I mean, it really is. It is a bit like a city in the respect that you've got. You know, you've got loads of nests that are kind of really regularly spaced. And so there's just penguins looking quite stoic, staying in one place. And then these massive highways of movement and partner exchanges. So they can't leave the egg. So you see a lot of a lot of what you see minute to minute is

penguins huddled over on a nest and then occasionally one relieving it. And the next one going to sea. So so the behaviors you see are largely the kind of stoic ones, the ability to stay in one place and stay warm for a long time, and then it's really, really visibly about the dedication to an egg and then a chick. And how do they find their nests again? Do you guys know? No, but I think if it's known, I don't know it.

But I. It doesn't bother me. I mean, I think if I could roughly find it's like in a crowd, you wouldn't say, oh, you're so clever that you can find a human in a crowd. I mean, you'd go to where you last saw them, then you might call. And, you know, it's not it's not that hard. We're giving them under your credit in that it's we could probably do that. Do they have certain calls for each other?

Absolutely. So they have particularly between chicks and adults and then between the adults, between the partners, it's probably more tone. So I'm sure they can recognize them by voice. But a lot of it we think is is tone. So it's like you come home, say to a partner, how are you? How are you, dear? Well, someone says, how was your day?

And you say, oh, fine. And they say, right, what's wrong? So tone is probably more important than what they're saying. Because to us, it seems like they're saying the same thing all the time. These calls can vary wildly between species. But most that I heard when I went down to deeper rabbit hole sounded like love, Lorne, horny kazoos. Mm hmm.

Oh, and what about monogamy? I know people like to cite penguins as these pillars of monogamy, but no animal really is definitely no bird. Definitely no. I mean, they're they're I mean, they're pretty monogamous to give them their due. And particularly if something works, they they stick with it. If it doesn't work or if the partner doesn't come back, they move on. Then within a season, there's also some extra pair, copulation.

Oh, hey. The I think estimates better roughly 10 percent. Penguins have been used as justification for a lot by all on the political spectrum. And that's absolutely fair. We can we can infer good qualities from penguins if we also are prepared to poo where we sleep and eat more krill. And outside of that, I think we should leave them to be penguins. So what about same sex penguin couples?

Is that only happening captivity or is that in the wild as well? I don't know if it's been conclusively shown in the world, but I would expect it to happen. So that's almost like giving humans too much credit to say that we're the only ones that can do it. But right. So no, I mean, I am I'm positive it's there. I'm not sure it's an interesting research question. OK, look this up. And there have been studies like one published in the journal Ethology in 2010,

which found that same sex courtship displays were common 28 percent of 53 displaying pairs in a study of king penguins. And that a fraction of those went on to learn each other's calls and bond as couples. 10 out of 10 would happily bake a cake for their nuptials. But Tom says there are more interesting questions to be had. What is he working on? In the field, we're generally like we get landed somewhere by small rubber boat called a zodiac and we jump off and we might be changing a camera and hoping it's

working, they usually do, but you know, you're very tense trying to get the data down. Often fly a drone so we can do all the counts and we can get spacings of penguins and things like that. And then we're often sampling, which is picking up feathers and taking poo samples. Oh, that's the good stuff. So in from those, the cameras are getting behavior. The drone will be looking at counts and also spatial structure of the colony.

Then poo samples are everything. Biologists do love poo. It's a great record. So that is everything from diseases to diet stress. We're doing more with that in over time. I mean, at the moment, we're looking at disease, but we also have plans on diets and stress. For more on these topics, see the recent scatology episode on poop or plumology on feathers.

Oh, and then also feathers, we can often see what they've been eating over time. We would use hair and forensics. Absolutely. I mean, it's grown at once, but over it's grown in one year, but over a period. That was the ground we, by the way, that's Mike Palito's work that I just took credit for. But I'm sure he won't mind. I picked up some of the feathers. And, you know, when it comes to populations for penguins, I'm afraid to ask, how are they doing?

Largely, fairly poorly. Some of them, some of them are doing well. So Gen 2 penguins and King penguins are doing pretty well. Largely, they're kind of the climate change winners. Also, King penguins, they were probably exploited in the past. So there's a kind of rebound from that. The ones that are within Antarctica or the Southern Ocean, the ones that are really dependent on krill and ice are doing very poorly.

Dailies and chinstraps are doing very poorly in the Scotia arc. The dailies are actually doing pretty well over in East Antarctica, which is the bit south of Australia. They're doing pretty well there, where the sea ice is relatively stable. But actually, you come outside of the Southern Ocean, come to South America, South Africa, and actually those temperate or sub temperate species, those are the ones that are doing really badly. I mean, they have crashed and that is hard to say, but it's likely a mixture of

direct disturbance and fishing. And in some cases, actually guano extraction as well, where they they took historic depositions of poo to use for fertilizer. And so that's actually destroyed habitat, where all the warmer weather burrowing penguins would burrow to have their nests. Stealing poo, not cool. No turd davery, please. And so it's more using it for industry rather than just sightseeing.

That is the disturbance. Absolutely, yeah. So, I mean, that's historic. Fishing is still very much going on, even in Antarctica. And tourism is an issue, but it's also sort of essential. I mean, we need people to keep an eye on other people down there. So you actually need this kind of standoff of tourism versus national programs to actually enforce and to flag up

pollution events and things like that. I mean, tourists largely are pretty well controlled. So I would say they are they have to be part of the solution. So don't feel bad about going to visit a penguin colony. No, no. If it's well run, I mean, if they're telling you to stay five to ten meters away, all of the tourism in Antarctica is pretty well regulated. I'm not sure that's true around the world where they're near human populations.

A stupid question. Do you have a favorite type of penguin? No comment. No comment. Wow, that means yes. Yes, that means yes. The arceus one, there is one species that is absolutely can I slag off New Yorkers or Londoners?

OK, so am I going to get hate mail? Yes. OK, we're just going to direct this toward Londoners because New York, it's been a rough couple of months. We see you and we love you. And wow, this is going to take some needling to get Tom to should talk a penguin species, right? So there are OK, well, it's macaroni penguins.

And basically, if you look at a colony of macaroni penguins, they would steal your hubcaps, they would. They're just wonderful. So they're charismatic in the level of aggression that they show each other. And it's a lot like imagine that you're sat at a table in some cafe in either London or New York, just watching all of this go down.

That's macaroni's. So they're scoundrels. Yeah, admirably so. OK, I'll take it. Yes, I can't believe I got that out of you. I'm so excited. Can I ask you questions? I can't believe I can't sew it easily.

It's the wine. Can I ask you questions from listeners? But before your questions, each week we donate to a cause of the ologist choosing and this week we did too. He had two picks and I was like, let's do it, man. So one is Terrestrial Restoration Action Society Seychelles, which plants mangroves and helps with deforestation along coastal regions, which also helps to

offset carbon footprints associated with global travel. So jet setters, that's a good one, an excellent choice. Another donation is going to Penguin Watch, which helps fund Dr. Hart's work alongside his collaborators around the world who've researched the threats to penguins and how to mitigate these threats using long term monitoring in the field and using genetic analysis of penguin feathers to get a complete picture of how populations are changing.

So donations went to both organizations. That was made possible by sponsors of the show, which you may hear about now. Links to those sponsors and the charities are in the show notes. But now your questions. Stupid questions from wonderful listeners. Zoe wants to know, do penguins smell more fishy or more birdie? Fishy, but they sort of smell, they smell seabirdy. Seabirdy?

So it's a mixture of raw sewage mixed in with ammonium. OK, but it's wonderful. After a while, you just, an osmere is a great thing. Your nose has a lot of nerves that talk to each other. And after a while, you don't smell it. OK, and I imagine it probably imprints as a comfort as a, oh, I'm back. Yeah, maybe or occasionally if someone opens

a bag in the lab or a notebook or something, you get it all comes back quite quick. Yeah, that olfactory nostalgia, I'm sure, is pretty hardcore. Smells so good. Alayna Clement-Chan-Charles, first time question asked her wants to know, what does a penguin feel like? What is their texture? But also, if you squeeze them just a little bit, would they be squishy or really solid? They would be really solid and they would hurt you back.

And OK. They're feathery. They'd feel like a strong muscled like duck or, you know, nothing like nothing like most of your pets, that's the key. They wouldn't feel they wouldn't feel soft and squishy like a dog or a cat. They're they are balls and muscle. Oh, and also, their bones are not hollow. So are they denser than your typical bird?

They're definitely, yeah, they're definitely heavier than them. Oh, yeah, than any equivalent size. And and also, they use their flippers as weapons, both on each other and on on passing researchers. So, yeah, they will they will flip a wacky if you get too close. Have you ever been slapped by a penguin? Oh, yeah. Does it hurt? Yeah. OK.

Are they are their flippers also feathered, right? Yes, they're very small feathers. So those, yeah, those are wings. They are flying underwater. But the feathers on a flipper are very small. It's almost like a shark skin. Where they're trying to shed small vortices so they don't get a lot of drag. So, yeah, it's like a

one way sandpaper kind of thing. Oh, OK. OK, I looked up photos of penguin feathers and, yes, on the flippers, they're very little and they overlap kind of like roof tiles. And then on the body, there is some serious fluff under the shiny surface. So that's good to keep out the chill. Maybe Serbs is padding for body tobogganing, perhaps. Sabina Kearney wants to know,

do penguins really slide on the ice as you see in Super Mario? I don't know what happens in Super Mario. I'm really sorry. But they do slide on the ice. They do? Yeah. Are they having fun? No, they usually, well, it's usually if they just need to get away fast or if it's really downhill. And I mean, they seem to prefer to walk unless it's really hard going because the snow is actually quite coarse and it rubs all the oil off their feathers.

So they want to keep, you know, that means they've got to preen later and re-oil them. OK, I was like, where are they getting this oil? They probably barf it up from a krill pouch in their beautiful weird necks. So I looked it up for us and thankfully it's just from a grease spigot near their butt. No biggie, it's at the base of their tail. It looks like a little fleshy nobber jobber. It's called the Euro-pigil gland. But you know what?

If you're close pals, please call it a preen gland. I'm waiting for some really stupid question from a friend. I'm positive. Michelle Lee wants to know, can penguins drink seawater? Is that how they stay hydrated? Absolutely. Yep, they eat snow and drink seawater and they have a gland just just beneath their eyeball at the back of the bill.

A lot like our kidneys, but actually functional for drinking seawater. So they can shed saline quite well without it dehydrating them. So yes, they can definitely, they can definitely get water from seawater, but they would, given a choice, they'd rather drink fresh or snow because it's not having to expend energy. Of getting rid of the salt. OK, this next one is about a penguin with a donkey call and thus a very unfortunate name.

Tony Olivier, first time question asker, wants to know the African penguins, previously known as Jackass penguins, are endangered and there's a project underway to try to create a new colony to bridge the big distance between the two existing colonies. Has this ever been attempted or achieved before and is it likely to succeed? I have no idea. Yeah, but it's definitely been achieved before in puffins on, I think, egg island up in Maine.

There was a colony of puffins that were reintroduced by someone. Yes, a researcher made like dummy puffin models and started broadcasting breeding calls because there were puffins around, but they weren't nesting and managed to get them to resettle. And I gather that's now quite a successful colony. I did not know that. Did you know that the porgs in Star Wars were puffins? Yes, we actually have a camera there.

Yeah, we actually have a camera that was just out of shot in that. So if you go on Seabird Watch, you can be part of Star Wars. OK, I look this up. Side note, and these scenes from The Last Jedi were filmed on Skellig McKell. Skellig Michael, I don't know. It's an Irish island, which is absolutely lousy with puffins just infested with these squat, colorfully beaked, just stomach churningly. Pretty Atlantic puffins.

They are so repulsive. You just want to you want to cuddle them. So, yes, Disney and Last Jedi director couldn't paint them out of the background. So they just made a new icon and a bunch of cash on Porg Merch. It was easier than cheating them out of the scenes. Oh, speaking of cheating, many of you patrons had questions about penguin monogamy, such as Julia, Ruby Johnstone, M Flying Squid with Goggles, Catalina of Barbaroo, Elisa Figueroa, Jesslyn, Zoe Jane, Natalie Brandt

and first time question askers Sylvia Traverio, Sam Cohen, Andrea Talvin, Julia Heyman and Emily Dix plus two folks, Sid Gopkajar and Enrique I.C. Sarmiento, who saw the same Nat Geo video titled Homewrecking Penguin. But this husband has come home to find his wife with another penguin. They saw this video in which two penguins nearly beat each other to death because one's partner cheated on them with the other. Is that a common occurrence? It's not common, but I've definitely seen it.

Really? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, that's classic social punishment to deter them. But yeah, yeah, that definitely happens. A lot of people had questions about flight and wings and flippers. They were Stephanie Burr-Hutty's M Anna Valerie, Michaela Goings, Vanessa Frey, Courtney Ryan, Corey Navas and Ashlyn, who wrote, do penguins have flippers? Are they technically wings?

Oh, boy, I'm so excited for this. And then there was a hard-eyed emoji. Troy Clarkson, as well as others want to know, have penguins always been flightless birds or were they at one point able to fly? And then they just got better and better at swimming. Yeah. So flightlessness has evolved several times in seabirds, and it's often the kind of offshore sea stack. Actually, fun fact, we get the word penguin means great orc,

which is now an extinct seabird in the Northern Hemisphere. Actually, it means white cap, white head. And so it's probably sailors that first came south saw something that they thought was a great orc. A great orc, side note, is a now extinct flightless bird whose numbers dwindled partly because its fluffy down plumage was prized in Europe. And now there are no more great orcs. So they stood nearly a meter tall.

They were great. They had a grooved black beak and they looked like a penguin, but they were not closely related. Flightlessness has evolved in seabirds several times in cormorants in the orcs and also in penguins. So I think the nearest, the nearest modern relative is something like a pelican. And the ancestral penguin was quite big and gradually, yeah,

you got better at probably diving and then gave up flight. I mean, there are examples of bad fliers like cormorants are a great one. So cormorants and shags aren't good fliers, but they're quite good divers. And so for a penguin to evolve, you probably have to have no predators on land and you probably have to be quite close to your food source so that you you get better at diving and you

you know, it matters less and less that you have to either be able to fly to escape predators or that you have to be good at flying to get there. And then you probably just get better and better at diving. Any flim flam that you would want to debunk any myths about penguins that you're so sick of? I'm really glad you defined flim flam. That they fall over when aircraft go overhead. So that doesn't happen. No, they used to be.

No, I don't know where it started. But yes, they don't fall over backwards and can't get up. This flim flam, by the way, started as stories of royal Air Force pilots swooping over the Falkland Islands and our penguin friends would stare up at them and crane their necks until they plopped backwards. So it was said. Now, this has been bird lore for so long that one penguin ologist, Dr. Richard Stone, finally flew a bunch of aircraft over some King

penguins in South Georgia at various altitudes for five weeks and nary a penguin toppled. Not one. They did run away and they seem irked, understandably. Like, can you not? No, enough. What about movies with penguins? Do you have a favorite or any that are on your shit list? Oh, yeah. Really? I want to say no comment, but I also really want to say it.

So Morgan Freeman is one of my favorite humans. And yet, yes. March of the Penguins is wonderful with the sound off and it's slightly exaggerated throughout. So it's really disappointing when Morgan Freeman is exaggerating about penguins and they're like, oh, Morgan. Yeah. So March of the Penguins is absolutely one of the best.

But yeah, it's just it's all kind of, you know, it's very dramatized with the sound on it would be happy feet. I mean, it gets the behavior so well. Really? So happy feet gets the behavior really well as well. Yeah. Just every now and then when they're walking in the attitude, it it's stunning. I mean, it captures something. It's like seeing you know, it's like someone doing an impression of someone famous or

or your best friend. It's a lot like that. So happy feet is really good. So enjoy March of the Penguins, but know that it's kind of like David Attenborough with a dash of Real Housewives. You absolutely don't need to exaggerate about Penguins. They are badass and they are really stoic and strong and amazing.

My respect. A lot of people, Sarah Nichelle, Josh Duncan, Megan Johnson, Alaina Clementson, Charles Madeline Dunkel, Taylee, Kawakami, Diane Peay all want to know what's happening with pebbles. What makes one pebble better than another? How do penguins decide on the best pebbles to give their mates? Lots is the simple answer. OK, so some species of penguins,

like gen twos, for example, are like, if you want a bone, you better bring me a bunch of small rocks. It's like a rose ceremony, but with a bunch of small rocks. So how do they decide on it if they can carry it? And it's I mean, they tend to be of a certain size. Parley, I think that's what's available, but they're definitely choosing.

I mean, it can't be like a stack of grain. It can't just fall down. So I mean, they're for insulation, basically, it's to keep the eggs and the chicks out of melt water when it starts getting a bit sloppy. So they're like a raised stone donut and the higher, the better. I think it's not just giving them their mate because they both do it.

They both maintain the nest, but the male is usually building while the male is building it. And then the female is usually helping. There's a lot of maintenance in between foraging trips. But yeah, Pylem high, that's the that's the secret. Pylem high and then keep your egg out of any melt water. Oh, so they're functional. They're not just like I thought you might like this.

It's a bit of both. It's good real estate. It's showing that you can provide. But so that's more in the choice. And then then it's maintaining something that it's maintaining a nest. Some people had questions about necks, knees. Taya McInnes wants to know why does a penguins neck account for so much of his body? And Madison Nobriga and Hadley literally just wrote penguin knees.

What's happening? Well, penguins do have knees. They're just tucked inside inside their body. So they look like a swan sat upright, basically. Oh, if you could take the flesh off. Let's not do that. Yeah. OK, so if you can picture a penguin,

like no neck, tiny stubby legs, right? Ha, that's what you think. That's what we all think. Their knees are way the hell up there. They're tucked up and almost like up near their rib cage. And then there's seemingly bodybuilder lack of a neck is actually a long boy. Their neck goes all the way down to where their flippers start. Pretty much.

Do they look like a fluffy potato? Yes, but they're like the billy eyelash of birds. What's under there is none of our damn business. The necks, I'm not sure why the necks are so long. Yeah, I've no idea why they've maintained that. Because it really is tucked inside the body most of the time. It's used in courtship. So anything that's kind of sexual signal is often maintained.

But in the water, I mean, it's tucked right in and they look a lot more like a torpedo, but they still have a lot of dexterity in their feet, in their legs, both walking and also in the water as rudders. Oh, as rudders. So that's kind of how they maneuver so fast. Yeah, it's deep. Can they dive? The record is an emperor penguin that's about

just over 500 meters. The smallest ones, little penguins in Australia might be 20 to 30 meters. Most of them in Antarctica are diving where the prey is. So that's kind of often anywhere between 40 and 60 meters. Emperor's half a K. That's pretty bonkers. How do they not get the bends? Well, most breath-holding means you don't have a buildup of nitrogen.

Also, most diving animals store a lot in their muscle and they have myoglobin that releases a bit more bit slowly. But yes, a lot of diving mammals. I don't know about birds, but a lot of diving mammals do get decompression sickness over time. Really, Kylie Wilkinson wants to know, are they black with white feathers or white with black feathers? I'm not sure.

I think, developmentally, they are white with black feathers because you can occasionally see mutations where you see a line, but you don't see the black is gray. But I'm not sure. OK. But it's amazing how many species are both black and white and that counter. So that's one of the coolest things about penguins is that

I mean, in general, everyone thinks of them as upright and they're not. That is where they come ashore to breed. And if they can breed in water, they would. When they're in water, that's the natural element. And like cormorants, like like so many seabirds and also a lot of killer whales and things like that, this counter shading is camouflage. So if you look at them in the water from above,

they're dark against a dark background. And if you look at them from underneath, they're light against the light background. Oh, my God. See black and white animals everywhere because that seems to be just a natural way to camouflage yourself in the ocean. I never even thought about that. Or because in penguins, they're wearing the same fabulous outfit and just slaying and getting slayed, but I want to think about that.

The most common question I got. By far, Megan Yance, Nicholas Kozulis, Megan Johnson, Nikki DeMarco, Kelly Brockington, Sarah Peck, Joey Tab, Amanda Lotz, Loretta Neal, Elizabeth Kapustka, Diana Silver and Jess Swan. All have the same question and it is. Why are they so cute? Why are penguins so thank you? Genuinely, no comment.

Do you find them cute? I know you work with them, but do you know I don't find them cute? I find them absolutely awesome. OK. No, they're not they're not cute. They're wonderful. OK, I love that distinction, but you would not patronize them to the point of calling them cute.

No. To you, are you aware as one listener, Julia Tolbert said, is it true that the Chinese word for penguin translates to business goose? I have no idea. I don't know. But maybe that's why we think they're cute is because we see them in a tuxedo, but really they're just like an they're like an orca counter shaded for maximum badassery. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

We need to have a completely different view of penguins. They're not cute. They're bad asses or a business goose. Or maybe we should think of us when we have to be smart as more business goose. I think we should. OK, y'all, I check this out and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's real. Oh, Lord. Oh, my word.

If there is nothing to be happy about and you're feeling glum, just remember business goose is a thing. All right. And to be fair, the Mandarin translation can also technically mean tiptoe goose. That's also great either or tiptoe business goose. All in my life has changed. Also, another thing that's real and I didn't know what aside to put it in was some species of penguins try to steal each other's chicks. If there's dyes, penguin abduction, not very businesslike.

The last questions I always ask, what do you hate the most about penguins or your work? There's got to be something that sucks about being a penguinologist. Email. Yeah, it's always email. I crave the destruction of email so I can get on with what is important. So, but no, I know there and in science short term contracts. OK, otherwise there is there is very little that is bad about my job.

So it's a tiny bit of insecurity and it's a lot about trying to do twelve months worth of admin and emails in eight months. OK. But otherwise, no, I literally have the best job in the world. It's it's incredible. And there are there are a lot of times where you pinch yourself and it's nuts. It's nuts what what me and my team collaborators is absolutely insane.

What we get to do and in the knowledge that we're making a difference. That is crazy. So I wish someone had told me that as a kid, because like that that is so important. And no, I just I genuinely cannot believe I still I still expect someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, no, you can't do that, the gigs up. What's your favorite thing about it?

The the year to year is the ability to make a difference. Then the kind of minute to minute, the highs are. I mean, we get some cases we've been to places that no one's ever been. And and most and a lot of them are just people where very few people have been or seen what we do. I mean, I've just got back from the South Sandwich Islands and we always have this argument.

And the fact that you say always have this argument in the South Sandwich Islands is a little bit like saying I was on the moon the other day. And no one no one gets it. But yeah, we were having this argument about because, you know, we don't have Google. So we were arguing and trying to calculate where the next nearest human was and was it on the space station or, you know, was it on South Georgia? And so yeah, there's some truly bonkers moments like that. There's quite a few nutty moments where you you pinch yourself and genuinely cannot

believe you get to do this. And is there anything that you feel like people can do for penguins? The average Joe? Absolutely. Eat less krill. So krill supplements are taken from Antarctica. It's actually hard to know the degree to which that's damaging Antarctica. But I do not think we should be exploiting Antarctica.

So omega three supplements from krill. I mean, they're a placebo anyway. And there was a a meta analysis recently that showed they had either no or they had negative impact on humans. So please don't eat krill. Eat less krill unless you're a penguin, in which case. OK, eat more krill. Otherwise, no, I mean, they can go to penguin watch.

That's every every time they go to penguin watching, click on something. We're they're helping us with data and protecting them. That's pretty wonderful. Thank you so much for doing this. You are the world's most famous penguinologist. So ask smart penguins stupid questions because they deserve our respect. They're not cute, even though they are very adorable. So to watch more penguins and follow Dr.

Tom Hart's work, you can check out twitter.com slash penguin underscore watch. They're also penguin underscore watch on Instagram. Penguin watch dot org will take you to the best video game ever. You can help scientists count business geese. They're using community science to get their counts right. I did it last night and it was like animal crossing but real animals. So there you go. You just get to look at pictures of penguins and clickity, clickity, click and help

them count. It's the best. A link to that will be in the show notes. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both. Thank you to everyone again for supporting on patreon.com slash oligies. If you want to ask questions and get some behind the scenes stuff. Oligies merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. That's managed by Shannon Feltas and Body Dutch.

Two sisters who host a comedy podcast called You Are That. You can check that out if you're looking for anyone. Bleeped episodes and transcripts are at the link in the show notes. And thank you to all the oligies transcribers and Emily White for heading that project. Thank you to Caleb Patton for bleeping episodes. Assisting editing was done by Jared Sleeper of the Mental Health Podcast, My Good Bad Brain. He hosts weekly live streams on Sundays at Tenning and Pacific with traumatologist

Dr. Nick Barr. And those are so great, especially these days. Thanks as always to Lead Editor and just the nicest business goose you can ask for, Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the kitty themed podcast and the dino themed Sea Jurassic Wright podcast. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. He's in a great band called Island. So do check them out if you stick around at the end of the episode. You know, I tell you a secret.

This week's secret is that down in my last roll of toilet paper, we got two boxes of Kleenex on standby. But at this rate, it was going to take a very long time to get any ordered. And there's none on shelves. So I did it. I got a bidet. I ordered a bidet. It came in the mail yesterday. I spent an extra twenty nine dollars for a warm water option because I'm not about to shoot an icicle at my butt yet to be installed.

Stay tuned. We're getting through this together. All right. Stay home. Stay in. Stay safe. Rest up. Talk to you next week. Bye bye.