Adélie penguin
| Dictionary: Adélie penguin |
n.
A common Antarctic penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) that has white underparts and a black back and head and lives and breeds in large exposed rookeries.
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| Animal Encyclopedia: Adelie penguin |
Pygoscelis adeliae
TAXONOMY
Catarrhactes adeliae Hombron and Jacquinot, 1841, Adelie Land.
OTHER COMMON NAMES
French: Manchot d'Adélie; German: Adeliepinguin; Spanish: Pingüino Adelia.
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Female weight 8.6–10.5 lb (3,890–4,740 g); male 9.6–11.8 lb (4,340–5,350 g). Back, tail, and head (including face) are
blue-black; underparts are white. Distinctive white eye ring. Feathers cover half of bill, which is black with orange base. Eyes are brown. Legs and feet are dull white to pink with black soles.
DISTRIBUTION
Circumpolar, associated with pack ice of Antarctic Zone. Breeds on coasts of the Antarctic continent and surrounding islands; non-breeding distribution is not well known.
HABITAT
Within home range, they breed wherever land is ice-free and access from the sea is feasible.
BEHAVIOR
Male and female defend territory vigorously; often fight with neighbors. Birds signal apprehension by raising head feathers. Common threat display is a sideways stare with crest raised and eyes rolled downward.
FEEDING ECOLOGY AND DIET
Take mostly krill but also fish and cephalopods. During incubation, the bird not tending the nest may make a very long foraging trip, traveling more than 93 mi (150 km) from the colony over the course of 9–25 days. One study of birds at Hope Bay documented a maximum dive of 558 ft (170 m); estimated prey capture rate was 1,150 krill per foraging trip (7.2 krill per minute).
REPRODUCTIVE BIOLOGY
Well studied. Monogamous, often return repeatedly to same nest site. Nest in large colonies of up to 200,000 pairs. Build nests of small stones. Considerable energy devoted to stone searching, stone stealing, and rearranging stones in nest. Two eggs laid; parents alternate incubation duties (sometimes with egg on feet) for 32–24 days. Young brooded for 22 days, then join small crèches; fed by parents until they leave colony at 50–60 days.
CONSERVATION STATUS
Not threatened. Stable or increasing; population estimated in 1993 at 2,610,000 breeding pairs. Susceptible to disturbance from human activity.
SIGNIFICANCE TO HUMANS
Ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy called Adelies "the type and epitome of the penguin family." Adelies are responsible for the habitual comparison of penguins to little men in evening clothes.
| WordNet: Adelie penguin |
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.
The noun has one meaning:
Meaning #1:
medium-sized penguins occurring in large colonies on the Adelie coast of Antarctica
Synonyms: Adelie, Pygoscelis adeliae
| Wikipedia: Adelie Penguin |
| Adélie Penguin | |
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| Conservation status | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Sphenisciformes |
| Family: | Spheniscidae |
| Genus: | Pygoscelis |
| Species: | P. adeliae |
| Binomial name | |
| Pygoscelis adeliae (Hombron & Jacquinot, 1841) |
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The Adélie Penguin, Pygoscelis adeliae, is a species of penguin common along the entire Antarctic coast and its nearby islands. They are among the most southerly distributed of all seabirds, along with the Emperor Penguin, South Polar Skua, Wilson's Storm Petrel, Snow Petrel, and Antarctic Petrel. In 1830, French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville named them for his wife, Adélie.
Contents |
Taxonomy
The Adélie Penguin is one of three species in the genus Pygoscelis. Mitochondrial and nuclear DNA evidence suggests the genus split from other penguins around 38 million years ago, about 2 million years after the ancestors of the genus Aptenodytes. In turn, the Adélie penguins split off from the other members of the genus around 19 million years ago.[1]
Distribution
There are 38 colonies of Adélie penguins, and there are over 5 million Adélies in the Ross Sea region. Ross Island supports a colony of approximately half a million Adélies.
Description
These penguins are mid-sized, being 46 to 75 cm (18 to 30 in) in length and 3.9 to 5.8 kg (8.6 to 12.8 lbs) in weight. Distinctive marks are the white ring surrounding the eye and the feathers at the base of the bill. These long feathers hide most of the red bill. The tail is a little longer than other penguins' tails.
Behavior
Like all penguins, the Adélie is highly social, foraging and nesting in groups. They also are very aggressive to other penguins that steal stones from their nest.
Diet
The Adélie penguin is known to feed mainly on Antarctic krill, ice krill, Antarctic silverfish, and Glacial Squid (diet varies depending on geographic location) during the chick-rearing season. The stable isotope record of fossil eggshell accumulated in colonies over the last 38,000 years reveals a sudden change from a fish-based diet to krill that started two hundred years ago. This is most likely due to the decline of the Antarctic Fur Seal since the late 1700s and Baleen whales in the twentieth century. The reduction of competition from these predators has resulted in a surplus of krill, which the penguins now exploit as an easier source of food.[2]
Reproduction
Adélie penguins arrive at their breeding grounds in October or November, at the end of winter and the start of spring. Their nests consist of stones piled together. In December, the warmest month in Antarctica (about -2°C), the parents take turns incubating the egg; one goes to feed and the other stays to warm the egg. The parent who is incubating does not eat. In March, the adults and their young return to the sea. The Adélie penguin lives on sea ice but needs the ice-free land to breed. With a reduction in sea ice and a scarcity of food, populations of the Adélie penguin have dropped by 65% over the past 25 years.[3]
In popular culture
- Early footage of the penguins was captured on the Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole by cameraman Herbert Ponting. They featured prominently in his 1933 documentary, Ninety Degrees South, because at the time nobody had managed to bring one back to Europe alive.
- The 1938 children's book Mr. Popper's Penguins revolves around the story of twelve Adélie penguins.
- The 1971 film Mr. Forbush and The Penguins[4] follows John Hurt's character as he spends 6 months observing (and becoming attached to) a colony of Adélie penguins.
- The 1988 children's film The Adventures of Scamper the Penguin featured Adélie Penguins.
- The 1995 film The Pebble and the Penguin was based on Adélie courtship behavior where the birds build nests of pebbles to attract mates.
- Mumble, the main character in the 2006 film Happy Feet, befriends a group of Mexican-accented Adélie penguins.
- In the webcomic Wally and Osborne, Osborne is an Adélie penguin.
- The Daily Telegraph, a major United Kingdom newspaper, ran an April Fool's Day 2008 joke promoting a BBC special showing flying Adélie penguins.[5]
- The CBBC children's show Pingu revolves around a family of penguins who are presumed to be adelie penguins.
References
- ^ Baker AJ, Pereira SL, Haddrath OP, Edge KA (2006). "Multiple gene evidence for expansion of extant penguins out of Antarctica due to global cooling". Proc Biol Sci. 273 (1582): 11–17. doi:. PMID 16519228. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1560011. Retrieved 2008-03-21.
- ^ S.D. Emslie & W.P. Patterson (July 2007). "Abrupt recent shift in δ13C and δ15N values in Adélie penguin eggshell in Antarctica". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (28): 11666–11669. doi:. PMID 17620620.
- ^ [1]
- ^ Mr. Forbush and The Penguins at the Internet Movie Database
- ^ Midgley, Neil. "Flying penguins found by BBC programme." The Telegraph. 1 April 2008.
External links
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pygoscelis adeliae |
- BirdLife Species Factsheet
- Info about all species of penguins
- 70south.com: Info on Adélie Penguin
- WWF adopt an Adélie penguin program
- Adélie Penguin images
- Photographs of Adélie Penguin
- Penguin World: Adélie Penguin
- Dr. George Murray Levick's 1914 book Antarctic Penguins
- Polar Discovery: Penguins and Lava Flows
- Understanding penguin response to climate and ecosystem change
- Roscoe, R. "Adelie Penguin". Photo Volcaniaca. http://www.photovolcanica.com/PenguinSpecies/Adelie/AdeliePenguinPhotos.html. Retrieved 13 April 2008.
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