Author: Sarah Zielinski / Source: Science News
In a fight between a pipsqueak and a giant, the giant should always win, right?
Well, a battle between an underwater David and Goliath has revealed that sometimes the little guy can come out on top.
He just needs the right armaments. The David in this case is the lobster krill. And instead of a slingshot, it’s armed with sharp pincers that can sometimes fight off a Goliath: the gentoo penguin.These gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) live on the Falkland Islands in the remote South Atlantic, where the birds nest among tall white grass. To eat, they trek from their colony some 800 meters to the sea along what conservation ecologist Jonathan Handley calls “penguin highways.” He worked with these penguins while at the Marine Apex Predator Research Unit at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
After staying at sea for a day or two hunting down their meals, the penguins return home along the same highways. Those predictable paths make it easy to find a single penguin after a swim. So, in December 2013, Handley and the MAPRU, along with Falklands Conservation, an organization that protects Falklands wildlife, began a project to see what the penguins did in the water.
The researchers started by setting up along one of the paths. “Then you wait really quiet, really low to the ground as the birds are coming past,” Handley says. With a net attached…
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