These Punk Rock Penguins Have a Bizarre Breeding Strategy
Christopher Intagliata: For 60-Second Science, I’m Christopher Intagliata. Hundreds of miles southeast of New Zealand, lie the windswept Bounty and Antipodes Islands. It’s there you’ll find the breeding grounds of what may be the world’s most punk-rock penguin. [Penguin calls]… which sports twin bleached-blond mohawks. Lloyd Davis: “It’s like if you took a penguin and put its flipper in an electricity outlet and it got a shock. That’s what you might imagine it looks like.” Intagliata: Lloyd Davis of New Zealand’s University of Otago says the erect-crested penguin, as it’s known, also has a peculiar breeding strategy. The females lay two eggs. But generally leave the first one to die. Davis: “They just plop the egg on the rock. It’s just bizarre to see. And then 40 percent just turn their back on it. They don’t even attempt to incubate it, it’s like ‘I don’t care about that.'” Intagliata: Davis says that’s unusual—because most birds pour resources into the first egg, and the second, and however many more … but the last egg is almost an afterthought. Davis: “The final egg acts like an insurance policy for them, so if they lose one of the other eggs, they can rear the chick from that one. But this is quite the opposite. Because, in this case—and this is why it’s…[full transcript]
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论文信息
Davis, L.S. et al. (2022) “The breeding biology of erect-crested penguins, Eudyptes sclateri: Hormones, behavior, obligate brood reduction and conservation,” PLOS ONE, 17(10).
