Penguin Hybrids
Back to PenguinologyWild penguins living in their natural habitat are found only in the Southern hemisphere. This is a great loss to those of us living in the other half of the world. Everyone knows what a penguin looks like, that is, until it's time to create a likeness of one. It's clear that, in the world of the imagination at least, penguins hybridize like drosophilae, resulting in birds not quite found in nature.
Gentoos seem to be a major player in the trans-species gene shuffle, with their orange beaks and feet showing up everywhere. Here are a few of the hybrids from my collection:
Little Bloos
Perhaps a gentoo cock got blown a bit off course and found himself amid a rookery of Fairy hens? The blue color appears to be dominant, as does the orange beak, while the orange feet are a little less so. Similarly, the gentoo's headband has appeared in the form of a crest? in one case, and not at all in the other.
That white eye ring on the bird on the left suggests an Adelie grandparent.
Adeloos
Some authors claim that it's possible to determine the sex of some of the Spheniscus and Eudyptes birds by examining such variables as beak size, with the males having the heavier and more robust. In addition, if you divided any given colony of penguins into larger and smaller birds, the half with the smaller birds would be predominantly female, and the half with the larger birds would be predominantly male, but it would not be a 100% division. That notwithstanding, the three Pygoscelis species show very little sexual dimorphism.
This pair, then, reveals a unique aspect of a cross between an Adelie (shown by the white eye ring) and a gentoo (feet and beak): the gentoo headband appears as dots, rather than a smooth band. It remains to be determined whether the fact that one bird has three dots and one has only two is gender-specific, or even carried forward into future generations.
This pair has not yet reached breeding age.
The Visible Penguin
Remember the Visible Man and the Visible Woman? Not quite a hybrid, per se, the Visible Penguin shows the internal accommodations that allow penguins to transport proportionally huge amounts of food back to their chicks.
As has been noted by anyone who has ever paid for overweight luggage, it's much much cheaper, energetically, to transport a heavy load by sea than by air. This is one case where penguins have a tremendous advantage over their flighted relatives.
Beanie Penguins
The designers at Ty, Inc., got it pretty close to right with their pair of macaronis, given the limits of felt and fluff. Pink feet, yellow crest, reddish beak, and an accurate placement of the black and white result in a bird that is quite accurate. The ethologists, however, might disagree.
The poem on the hang tag reads:
Waddling on the slippery ice,Frigid™ thinks the cold is nice.
He jumps into the water below
Then does it again, he loves it so!
Macaronis are more of a beach bird than an ice bird, and the eyes of the crested penguins are red when they are eating krill. But these birds are close...
Gentoyal
This little guy looks like a far-ranging gentoo surprised his Royal mother, and maybe there's a duck in the lineup somewhere, too?
Phygoscelis burdicki
Dicky birds? These may be the only true penguins of the Northern Hemisphere. Although they have the general markings of Adelies, they were captured in Cambridge, MA. Their pedigree, however, indicates there may be some germ plasm from Venezuela.
Unique among all penguin species, these little guys taste good. We can only wonder how those folks at MIT got them to taste like lemon, almonds, and dark chocolate, instead of krill!
www.burdickchocolate.com