Cameras reveal penguins' efficient hunting techniques

Intimate details of Adelie penguin feeding behaviour have been filmed by Japanese scientists.

Using video cameras and accelerometers attached to free-swimming penguins, researchers have gained a unique insight into the birds' hunting techniques.

Adelie penguins adopted different strategies depending on whether they were hunting fish or krill.

The findings are published in the journal PNAS.

Lead scientist Dr Yuuki Watanabe from the National Institute of Polar Research in Tokyo, Japan, told BBC Nature: "Foraging is the most basic activity of animals, but details of foraging behaviour are poorly known, especially in marine animals."

Although previous studies had examined Adelie penguin's (Pygoscelis adeliae) foraging style using video apparatus or sensor technology, results were limited.

"Previously some researchers attached video cameras to marine animals to observe their foraging behaviour, but this was just a few hours."

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/21125022

Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin

'Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal Landmark polar research about the Adelie penguin's sex life by Captain  Scott's expedition, deemed too shocking for the public 100 years ago, is unearthed at the Natural History Museum

• Robin McKie, science editor
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 June 2012 11.31 BST

It was the sight of a young male Adélie penguin attempting to have sex with a dead female that particularly unnerved George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition. No such observation had ever been recorded before, as far as he knew, and Levick, a typical Edwardian Englishman, was horrified. Blizzards and freezing cold were one thing. 
Penguin perversion was another.

Worse was to come, however. Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adélies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there. During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.

Levick blamed this "astonishing depravity" on "hooligan males" and wrote down his observations in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would understand the horrors he had witnessed. Back in Britain he produced a paper (in English), titled Natural History of the Adélie Penguin. However, the section about the animal's sexual proclivities was deemed to be so shocking it was removed to preserve decency. Levick then used this material as the 
basis for a separate short paper, Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin, which was privately circulated among a handful of experts.

In fact, Levick's observations turned out to be well ahead of their time. Scientists had to wait another 50 years before the remarkable sexual antics of the Adélie were revealed. By this time his pamphlet and its detailed records of Adélie shenanigans had been lost to science .

Continued:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/09/sex-depravity-penguins-scott-antarctic