Molto Bene: Penguin Molt Cycles

Penguin Molt Cycles

Exciting stuff huh? I can understand why you will need some convincing. So here goes.

Feathers are protein. Not as dense as muscle but a substantial investment when one's body is completely covered in it. Imagine if you had to regenerate your skin all in one go at least once a year.

Go ahead, grab a pinch of your skin between your fingers. Feel the thickness and the heft. Surprisingly, it is comparable to the thickness and heft of the insulating layer of feathers on a King Penguin. These creatures swim in some of the coldest seas on the planet, often a couple of degrees below freezing (Yes, below. The water can get that cold and stay liquid because of the salinity which prevents the formation of crystals until it gets even colder).

I know how cold it is because I went for a swim in Antarctica. Well, not strictly a swim, more like a crazy dash up to my neck and back out before the high pitched scream I was emitting did permanent damage to my hearing. We're talking voice-changing cold if you know what I mean.

Anyway, enough of me and my bid for the Vienna Boy's Choir. Penguins are hatched with a downy coat that covers everything except their feet, eyes, beak and anus. A place to see out of, a place for nutrients to go in and out and a way to walk without gumming up the apparatus and tracking stuff in on the rug. Other birds have bare patches between tracts of feathers to allow them to radiate heat off their bodies. Penguins can't afford to lose heat. If they do get hot they head to the water or engage in gular flutter (another exciting topic we'll skip for now. Think panting like a dog). A Penguin's feather tracts are continuous. This is the bird version of sea otter fur. The feathers are so tightly packed that water can not get to the skin. Yeah, that's right, WATER cannot get between the feathers! So when I said it is about the thickness and heft of your skin, I wasn't joking.

As the baby penguin grows it adds more downy feathers. The hard-working parents aren't just feeding a chick, they are supplying a feather factory too. That takes a lot of krill. A lot. So the chick grows bigger and bigger until it even surpasses the weight and girth of the parents. Why? Because now it is going to throw away all that hard work and molt into adult plumage. When they are sufficiently fat (see the picture) they re-route those food resources from bodily growth and development into making feathers.

The old baby stuff gets pushed out from underneath and falls off leaving funny looking, temporary Mohawks, chest hair or afros. Seems a waste, but they need the first downy coat for survival on land and the second sleek plumage for life in the cold, cold seas.

When the old downy coat is gone they are too. They enter the sea where they are now responsible for their own feathers. Until they reach the next stage they work at fluffing and oiling the feathers to keep them working correctly. The oil comes from a gland at the base of the tail called the uropygial gland. Found on the pygostyle (pronounced PIG-O-STYLE, Ha Ha!) It doesn't look very attractive either (see picture).

They press the gland with their bill which causes it to leak a clear oily liquid. Using the bill they painstakingly dab and swipe transferring oil from the gland to all their feathers (Remember how many that was? I never gave you a count, but water can't get to the skin. Remember that). If the feathers don't get a coating they lose the repellency and water dampens them and they droop towards the skin making cold patches. Brrrr!

So depending on the species, they spend a year or several at sea eating krill, fish or squid, making uropygial oil and storing up fat. The fat is for the next stage. At some point the old feathers get worn down and need to be replaced. This part is tricky. They must come onto land and do nothing for days on end while they push out the old adult feathers. To go and feed in the sea at this point would expose them to killing cold. The old feather come out in messy patches. Compared to the usual, sleek, well groomed look, at this stage they look like they have mange or something.

The feathers coming in are the same color as the ones on top so they just look messy and diseased, but aren't. When I went ashore at a King Penguin colony the first time I saw these curved little white things all over the ground. Honestly, my first impression was "where did all these big toenail clippings come from?" It took me a while to realize no one was doing pedicures on the beach and saw that they were feathers. They were everywhere. There were small drifts surrounding rocks and sleeping elephant seals.

That's when it hit me, molting is a major life activity for birds. It uses up a huge amount of stored fat. I suppose a bird could even starve to death molting. The penguin story makes the whole process look more extreme, but I realize this is a time of vulnerability that compares with reproduction and rearing. Molting is a big deal.

Lush Life

Lush Life

One of my earlier blogs asked the question about how the creatures of the Antarctic region were thriving versus striving. Now I am ready to attempt an answer.
After seeing the exuberant riot of living masses on Salisbury Plain and Saint Andrews Bay one could not deny that these creatures have found a secret to not just eking out a living, but having capitalized on a rich, deep and renewable well of LIFE.

These are creatures of the sea: lustrous Fur Seals, blubbery fat Elephant Seals, sleek, golden-cheeked King Penguins, attendant scavenging Skuas, Chicken-like Snowy Sheathbills, keening Kelp Gulls and the scary dinosauric Giant Petrels looking for the weak and unattended all surrounded by tall, vibrant, green Tussock Grasses and swaying kelp forests just off shore. The place owes it all to the ocean. It starts with tiny, microscopic diatoms, cyanobacteria and dinoflagellates that capture the energy of the sun and use it to convert carbon dioxide and water into energy. They are profligate and generous producing sugars, fats and proteins in abundance. Slightly larger, but still microscopic, Protozoans gobble up the bounty on offer. Increasing size continues through Copepods, Arrow worms, larval crustaceans, worms, fish, sea stars and jellies. The keystone creature here in the Antarctic waters is a small crustacean about the size (and color) of a baby's pinkie finger called Krill. They resemble and are related to shrimp. They are a key species because they link the microscopic to the macroscopic. The unseen to the seeable. They can see, find and consume a universe of pinhead sized and often clear organisms that make a rich soup of sealife. On that they grow in uncountable gazillions. Krill turn the ocean red. These are the food of the great whales, leviathans that reach 90 feet in length and weigh one hundred tons. They also feed penguins, seals and the soaring seabirds.

These animals grow fat on the gushing current that sweeps Krill from the ice edge and out into the Southern Ocean to feed the penguin colonies and the haul-outs of the giant seals that wallow on the beaches. The excrement of the teeming hordes is just Krill fertilizer ground into the new soils of the recently glaciated shores made available by retreating ice.

The concentration and abundance of organisms here is really staggering. Our ancestors saw hordes like this regularly, but to our modern eyes it is shocking. It is hard to comprehend. It is prehistoric and unexpected in a world where we are so used to being dominant and the animals are peripheral. Here, we are minimized, insignificant, ignored, a comically small, speck of a sideshow and it feels so right.

The first colony I visited at Salisbury Plain changed the color of an entire huge hillside about the size of three football fields. From there it spread like a living lava flow onto a vast plain covering three times that area. When no one else was near I stood facing the colony, my back to the sea from which they came, my nose wrinkled from the smell, my ears filled with the cacophony of call and response and a smile spread across my face as an offering of thanks to the ocean behind me that brought this lush life to be. I was so happy to be a witness to what nature could produce unmolested by human interference.

The Most Amazing Place You've Never heard Of.

South Georgia, the most amazing place you've never heard of.

Everyone knows about the Serengeti Plains, the Galápagos Islands, The Great Barrier Reef and Yellowstone National Park as places to see great gatherings of wildlife. South Georgia belongs on that list. It is a crescent shaped island, 104 miles long and 23 miles wide that sits at the far southern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. It is at least a two day sail in a modern ship from anywhere across some of the roughest seas in the world and that must be one of the reasons it is so poorly known.

I first landed in the North at Salisbury Plain on Christmas Day 2014. The following two days we made landings at Saint Andrews Bay and at Gold Harbor to visit King Penguin colonies. I hate to give any of these places short shrift, but they each had similar characteristics. Each had a long curving sandy beach with a relatively steep slope. Beyond the crest was a gentle slope to pools of water. Behind that were grassy plains extending back a quarter to a full mile to glaciers and steep rocky mountains.

On the beach were King Penguins coming or going from the water along with burly male Antarctic Fur Seals, nursing mothers with their very cute pups and the rambunctious yearling males. In the North at Salisbury Plain there were very few Elephant Seals but they increased the further south we went from Saint Andrews down to Gold Harbor at the southern tip where it would be safe to rename the place "Blubber Beach". At Gold Harbor there were Snowy Sheathbills in addition to the ubiquitous Antarctic Skuas and scary Giant Petrels that patrolled all the penguin colonies for easy pickings among the weak, injured or poorly attended.

For each landing, the ship would anchor some distance offshore, but close enough to smell the pungent odor and see the particular pattern of black and white adults intermixed with the light brown of the young "Oakum Boys", as the still downy covered but full-sized chicks are known. Those going ashore would board a Zodiac from the rear deck of the ship and be zoomed ashore by the raft of Zodiac operators waiting to shuttle us. On the beach, were a gang of dry-suited, balaclava wearing strong men who would stand in the frigid surf and steady the boat while we swung our legs overboard and made our way up the shingle to the high tide line. There we were briefed about where we could or could not go in strict accordance with rules regarding our interactions with the bellowing, trumpeting, crying, flapping, swooping and belching menagerie of animal flesh before us.

Before us were a pathway of stakes with fluttering red flags to guide us. Along the way were Expedition staff in yellow jackets to fend off testosterone charged young male fur seals or to keep us from treading on seal pups or disturbing stoic molting penguins. If you have watched TV in the last fifty years (who hasn't?) you know what a spectacle the migration of the wildebeest of the Serengeti looks like, maybe you've even seen it, but you cannot picture this. As you walk up the beach the noise gets louder as you near the edge of the greatest gathering of birds you are ever likely to visit. The smell saturates your sinuses and you can taste it in your mouth. The calls range from off key trumpets to plaintive ululations. The colors the days I visited were rich and bright. Dark vegetable green of the tussock grasses contrasted with the flowing wind-whipped brown coats of the Peter Max-like overstuffed bodies of the "Oakum Boys". The beautiful adults were not a simple black and white but showed grays and silver in their plumage and accented with the bright orange on their faces and chests. Gray rocks stuck up out of the rich brown soil and between the beach and the uncounted masses adorning the hillside a chocolate pond made of a soup of melting ice water, soil and bird feces through which many of them waded to reach their stridulating chicks on the mile distant hillside.

No, it wasn't all pleasant. There were carcasses strewn here and there. Dead chicks, dead adults, dead seals and scattered bones. Smells that made you breathe through your mouth. A cacophony of sound  to jumble your thoughts. But you could not stand here and not feel the power of LIFE! This place was creation on steroids, turbocharged, full-tilt. This is a place you feel in your bones.