Emperor Penguin

Lore & Background

In 1778, the English illustrator John Frederick Miller included a hand-coloured engraving of the king penguin in his Icones animalium et plantarum. He coined the binomial name Aptenodytes patagonica and specified the type locality as the Mari antarctico, the Antarctic Ocean. The locality was restricted to South Georgia by Gregory Mathews in 1911. The International Ornithologists' Union considers the species monotypic, recognizing no subspecies. However, some taxonomic authorities recognize two subspecies, A. p. patagonicus and A. p. halli; in this system, patagonicus is found in the South Atlantic and halli in the South Indian Ocean (at the Kerguelen Islands, Crozet Islands, Prince Edward Islands, and Heard Island and McDonald Islands) and at Macquarie Island.

In Their Own Story

By the early 1920s, the king penguin population in South Georgia and the Falklands was nearly wiped out by whalers based on these islands. Constant fires were required to boil whale blubber for extraction of the oil. As the Falklands and South Georgia had no trees to use for firewood, the whalers burned millions of oily, blubber-rich penguins as fuel. The whalers also used penguin oil for lamps, heating and cooking, in addition to eating the birds and their eggs. One of the largest known king penguin colonies, on Île aux Cochons in the Crozet Islands, experienced a massive drop in its population over the last few decades, from about half a million breeding pairs in the 1980s to about 60,000 breeding pairs in 2017.

Reader's Guide

King penguins mainly eat lanternfish, squid, and krill. On foraging trips, king penguins repeatedly dive to over 100 metres, and have been recorded at depths greater than 300 metres. The current maximum dive recorded is 343 metres in the Falkland Islands region, and a maximum time submerged of 552 seconds was recorded at the Crozet Islands. The king penguin dives during daylight hours to depths of 100–300 meters, spending around five minutes submerged, and to less than 30 metres at night. Predators of the king penguin include giant petrels, skuas, the snowy sheathbill, the leopard seal, and the orca. The king penguin is able to breed at three years of age, although only a very small minority actually do then; the average age of first breeding is around 5–6 years. King penguins are serially monogamous.

Did You Know?

• The king penguin is approximately 25% shorter and weighs around a third less than the emperor penguin.
• The cheek patch of the adult king penguin is a solid bright orange, whereas that of the emperor penguin is yellow and white.
• The king penguin's average swimming speed is 6.5–10 km/h.
• The Nature Protection Society released several king penguins at Gjesvær in Finnmark and Røst in Lofoten in northern Norway in August 1936.
• King penguins have been shown to detect airborne odors from conspecific feathers and feces.