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March 15 2012
Spy Eggs Help Get to the Bottom of Penguin Trash-Talking
Think I’m cute? Them’s fightin’ words.
If you think penguins are cute, huggable things, you have not met a little blue penguin (yes, that’s actually the name of the species). Adorably named but fiercely territorial, male little blue penguins will get into bill-slashing, flipper-whacking fights. One-eyed penguins are not uncommon.
After winning a fight, the penguins flap their flippers around and engage in loud braying (listen here). After seeing (and hearing) this behavior, researchers wondered: Are the winners just really happy to have both eyes, or are they sending signals of their toughness to “social eavesdroppers” in the penguin colony?
To test their hypothesis, the researchers got clever, temporarily swapping a fake, pulse-measuring egg into the nest of an eavesdropping penguin. As the penguin sat incubating on the fake egg, the scientists replayed the sounds of a fight followed by the approaching calls of the winner or loser. The heart rate of male penguins jumped when they heard a winner, but not a loser, approaching. The males were also less likely to call in response to an approaching winner. By advertising their victories, winners may be keeping competition at bay.
So male penguins brag to pump ...
February 02 2012
Hearty Penguin Steaks: the Old-School Explorers’ Salve for Scurvy
An Emperor penguin being skinned on board the Endurance.
Imagine you’re in Antarctica. It’s cold. You’re cold. Your joints ache, old wounds are reopening to ooze pus, and your teeth loosen, threatening to fall out one or two at a time. What do you feel like eating? How about ”a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce?”
If this sounds delicious, then your stomach serves you well. That’s how famous polar explorer Frederick Cook described the taste of penguin meat, and that is how you cure yourself of scurvy in Antarctica when fresh vegetables are nowhere to be found. Fresh meat—lightly cooked or raw—contains vitamin C, whose deficiency causes scurvy and the delightful symptoms described above.
Unfortunately for turn-of-the-century Antarctic explorers, most expedition leaders were not as enlightened as Cook and many a man succumbed to scurvy. Unfortunately for Antarctica’s penguins, they were also easy prey for the men who did eat them. “Long lines of curious penguins marched across the ice and right into camp, which almost always meant death as dog food, human food, or fuel for the boiler. A stew ...
October 01 2010
Google Street View Goes to Antarctica, Brings Maps to the Penguins
Google’s expansion of its Street View project to all seven continents has the sweet reward of allowing you to visit Antarctica while sitting on your couch in your leopard-print snuggie. (They also filled in the holes of Ireland and Brazil, but much as we love those countries, Antarctica is still more exciting.)
Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist, told The Guardian that this feat was “hugely significant” to the Goog:
“One of the challenges we wanted to crack is to go to these remote places, and one of geo team at Google went to Antarctica so he took some kit and took some imagery. It’s called Street View, but there aren’t many streets in Antarctica,” he said. “This allows people to understand the contrast between New York Times Square and being on the edge of a glacier looking at penguins.”
It’s also making the chinstrap penguins and red-parka’d researchers that inhabit the island the victims of some pretty intense privacy invasion. The images were shot in Half Moon Island, a part of the South Shetland Island chain in the northern most part of the continent, under South America.
You can explore the colony and other views of the earth on Google’s Street View gallery. The Antarctica views were shot by Google’s own Brian McClendon, vice-president of engineering, who carried around a camera while visiting the area with his wife. He announced the new features in a blog post, saying:
We hope this new imagery will help people in Ireland, Brazil, and even the penguins of Antarctica to navigate nearby, as well as enable people around the world to learn more about these areas.
Related content:
Discoblog: Confused (and Injured) Pedestrian Sues Google Maps Over Bad Directions
Discoblog: Pedestrian-Removing Software Makes for a Creepy Google Streetview
80beats: Researchers Use Feather “Fingerprints” to Track Penguins
Not Exactly Rocket Science: A fossil penguin gets its colours
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Are emperor penguins marching to extinction?
DISCOVER: Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google
DISCOVER: The Coolest Science Experiments in Antarctica (PICS)
Image: Google Maps
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