Mail archives:
Polar Mail
December 24, 2007
Question
Hello,
I would like to know if all of the different kinds of penguins get along well? If they do get along well, has there ever been two different kinds mating?
Kallyn B.
Answer
Dear Kallyn B:
Thanks for your question about how penguins get along with other species. Here in the Ross Sea, there are only two species around: the little Adelies and the big, graceful emperors. In general, penguins don't bother with other penguin species much. Grant Ballard says he doesn't know of any cases of two penguin species mating. An Adelie penguin might accidentally get together with a chinstrap penguin since the two species are closely related. But nature tends to keep that from happening, since the two species usually breed pretty far away from each other. Also, Grant says, "They're pretty cantankerous. It's hard enough to get Adelies to mate with each other." Thanks for asking, and let me know if you or your Mills Lawn classmates have any more questions. Happy holidays,
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Questions about Penguins
Why do people study penguins? You said that penguins can live to be 15 to 20 years old. How do you know? How can you tell how old a penguin is, or even if it is a boy or a girl penguin? What do you eat there? What size is a penguin's egg? Can you have dogs with you in Antarctica? We really like seeing the pictures and reading about what you are doing. We especially like that you tried to dance with the penguins.
Mrs. Coffman's second graders
Cherrington Elementary School
Westerville, OH
Answer
Dear Mrs. Coffman's second graders,
I hope you are still following our journey here in Antarctica. I've been living with the penguin researchers at Cape Crozier for the last four days and they've given me some answers to your great penguin questions. Since you asked so many, I'm going to answer them individually below. Thanks again for reading, and keep asking questions! It's the key to being a good scientist. When you've finished reading this, if you have more penguin questions look at the researchers' website: http://www.penguinscience.com If you click on the education tab you'll find tons of questions submitted by other schoolkids. Happy Christmas,
Penguin Questions & Answers by scientists Viola Toniolo and Grant Ballard
Question
Why do people study penguins?
Answer
Viola says, "Because they're cool."
Grant says, "For lots of reasons. Adelie penguins are awesome to study because we already know so much about them - people have been studying them for 100 years - so we can get a complete picture of a whole system. Most animals live their lives in places we can't see them - in vegetation, on coral reefs, under mud - but penguins do their whole breeding season in open. We can walk right up to them and watch what they're up to without altering their behavior. I like to study them because they're amazingly well suited to an environemnt that's hard to imagine. For us it's a life-threatening situation just to go outside, but they just hang out there all the time. They don't have to come inside the hut and get warm. And I like to dive, so I'm amazed by how they can dive so well."
Question
You said that penguins can live to be 15 to 20 years old. How do you know? How can you tell how old a penguin is, or even if it is a boy or a girl penguin?
Answer
Viola says, "We know how old they are from flipper bands. We put bands on them when they're chicks. Then, if we ever see the band again, we know exactly how old the bird is. Our oldest birds right now are 16 years old."
Grant says, "We can tell whether they're boys or girls by their behavior, and by when we see them at the colony. The girls lay eggs, and then right afterwards they go back to sea to eat. The birds that take the first incubation shift are almost always boys. We can also compare the size of their heads and bills; males tend to be larger than the females. When you see them together you can compare their sizes to each other.
Question
What do you eat there?
Answer
Grant says, "Anything that can be frozen, canned, or dehydrated we eat."
Viola says, "But we cook from scratch a lot too. We have flour, we bake bread. The only thing we don't get much is fresh lettuce or fruits and vegetables."
Question
What size is a penguin's egg?
Answer
Grant says, "It's about twice as big as a chicken's egg."
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Question
Hi Hugh,
Ms. Button had the pleasure of talking to you and Chris during a conference call on Dec. 8th at Kellogg Biological Station and couldn't wait to get back to school to share the Polar Discovery website with our 1st-grade class. We've been practicing asking science questions all semester, and are getting pretty good. Here are some questions we are really hoping you'll have time to answer.
Mrs. Bailey's and Ms. Button's 1st grade class
Sunset Lake Elementary
Vicksburg, MI
Answer
Dear Mrs. Bailey, Ms. Button, and your first graders,
Thanks for writing to us! I'm sitting in a little hut above the Ross Sea with three penguin researchers. We're getting ready to go down the mountain to watch penguins for the day - but first I asked them your great questions about penguins. Here's what they said: Thanks for asking, and please keep being curious about the natural world. When you've finished reading this, if you have more penguin questions look at the researchers' website: http://www.penguinscience.com If you click on the education tab, you'll find tons of questions submitted by other schoolkids. Happy holidays,
Questions and Answers from scientists Viola Toniolo, Grant Ballard and Kirsten Lindquist
Question
How fast can penguins go when they slide on their tummies?
Answer
Viola Toniolo says, "It depends how steep a slope they're on! It's like when you go skiing."
Grant Ballard says, "The fastest I've seen them go is about 10 kilometers an hour (or 6 miles per hour, a little faster than you can walk)."
Kirsten Lindquist says, "But they brake themselves if they get going too fast by sticking their feet down. Or they can also push themselves faster with their flippers."
Question
Are the penguins nice?
Answer
Viola says, "It depends what you mean by nice. Some are nice, some are not nice, just like people. The nice ones come up to you and they nibble at your clothes. The mean ones come up to you and flipper-bash you and bite you. There are about equal amounts of each."
Grant says, "To each other, they're mostly not nice unless they're flirting.”
Viola: "When you see them at the ice edge in groups, they're always bickering with each other. They can fight with each other like nobody's business."
Grant: "They seem to have space issues. They don't want anybody within about six inches unless it's their husband or wife. They wouldn't like the subway very much."
Question
How much do the penguins weigh?
Answer
Grant says, "4 kilograms on average, up to about 6 kilograms. That's maybe half a turkey. But they're more dense - all that weight is stuffed into a smaller package."
Question
What do the penguins eat?
Answer
Grant says, "They eat fish and krill, which are small, free-swimming shrimp. To be specific, Antarctic silverfish (which are kind of like anchovies) and crystal krill.
Viola says, "In winter they also eat things like squid, and tiny animals called copepods."
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Question
Have you found any lava rocks and are you allowed to bring any home?
Answer
Ross Island and Mount Morning are packed full of lava rocks. It's harder to find rocks that aren't lava - the hut we're living in is sitting on a big slope of lava, and the rocks we use to hold our tents down are made of lava. We're not allowed to bring any home, because people want to keep Antarctica an untouched place, just as wild as when the first explorers set eyes on it.
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Question
Why didn't the lava melt all the ice?
Answer
Great question! Lava is really, really hot, but then ice - and Antarctic air - is really, really cold. It boils down to a sort of a tug-of-war between the two. It turns out that there was way more ice than there was lava, so eventually the glowing-hot streams cooled down and came to a halt, and then sat there for thousands of years until we found them.
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Question
How much ice is there?
Answer
You know when your freezer gets ice-caked on the inside and your mom has to chip it away so there's room for the ice cream? There's way more ice in Antarctica than that. Just around the edge of the continent there's more ice than the area of the entire United States. Over most of Antarctica the ice is thousands of feet thick. Near the South Pole the ice can be nearly 10,000 feet thick - more than enough to completely cover up the highest mountains in the eastern U.S.
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Question
Have you seen any volcanoes erupt?
Answer
While we were at McMurdo, Cape Royds, and Mount Morning, we could see Mount Erebus erupt nearly every day. Puffy columns of steam would rise into the sky and then get caught in the winds. If we had gone to the very top of the mountain (12,400 feet), we could have looked inside the crater and seen the lava bubbling away in a steaming orange lake.
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Question
How did you and Chris get such cool jobs?
Answer
We studied really hard, practiced our writing and photography, and tried our hardest to persuade people to let us come down here. Lots of times it turns out that if you keep trying to do something you believe in, people will help you do it.
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Question
We hope you are having a great time learning all about penguins and lava rocks and that you aren't too sad that the trip is almost over.
Answer
We are having a great time - and you guessed it, we are sad the trip is almost over. Thanks!
—Hugh Powell and Chris Linder
