Author: Sarah Zielinski / Source: Science News for Students
In a fight between a pipsqueak and a giant, the giant should win, right?
Well, a battle between this underwater David and Goliath has revealed that sometimes the little guy triumphs. He just needs the right weaponry, a new study suggests.The David in this case is the lobster krill. A small crustacean, it lives in the ocean. And instead of a slingshot, it’s armed with sharp pincers that can sometimes deter a Goliath: the gentoo penguin.
These penguins (Pygoscelis papua) live on the Falkland Islands in the remote South Atlantic. There, the birds nest in tall white grass. To eat, they trek some 800 meters (0.5 mile) from their colony to the sea. Jonathan Handley refers to the paths they take as “penguin highways.” Handley is a conservation ecologist. He studied these penguins while he was working for the Marine Apex Predator Research Unit (MAPRU) at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
After spending a day or two feeding, the penguins return home along the same highways. Those predictable paths make a single penguin easy to find after its swim. So, in December 2013, MAPRU and Falklands Conservation launched a project to see what the penguins did while dining at sea….
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