How many species of penguins are there? (2023)

FAQs

How many species of penguins are there? ›

Facts. Penguins are a family of 17 to 19 species of birds that live primarily in the Southern Hemisphere.

These include: the Snares penguin, Galápagos penguin, African penguin, Adélie penguin, Humboldt penguin, rockhopper penguin, emperor penguin, royal penguin, macaroni penguin, gentoo penguin, Fiordland penguin, chinstrap penguin, king penguin, little blue/fairy penguin, yellow eyed penguin, Magellanic penguin and the ...

The eighteen species are Emperor, King, Royal, Adelie, Macaroni, Gentoo, Galapagos, Magellanic, Humboldt, African, Snares, Fiordland, Little Blue, Yellow Eye, Erect Crested, Northern Rockhopper, Southern Rockhopper, and Chinstrap.

There are 17 species of penguin on the planet, but the eight you'll most likely recognize live in Antarctica, its nearby islands, and the sub-Antarctic archipelagos of South Georgia and the Falklands.

Penguins are only found in the Southern Hemisphere. The greatest concentrations are on Antarctic coasts and sub-Antarctic islands. There are 18 species of penguins, 5 of which live in Antarctica. Another 4 species live on sub-Antarctic islands.

It wasn't the oldest or even—if you can believe it—the largest penguin in Earth's history, but the newly discovered mega-penguin, Kumimanu biceae, is a giant compared to modern birds.

All-black penguins are so rare there is practically no research on the subject–biologists guess that perhaps one in every quarter million of penguins shows evidence of at least partial melanism, whereas the penguin we saw appears to be almost entirely (if not entirely) melanistic.

Emperor and king penguins lay one egg while all other penguins lay two eggs.

Penguin poop is called guano. Just like flighted birds you may see that it is sometimes white and sometimes has brown, green, or black in it. The white part is the urine, and the other colors are the poop.

As a group, penguins are one of the two most threatened seabird species in the world. According to Birdlife International, 10 of the world's 18 penguin species are considered endangered. Of the 8 Antarctic penguin species two are vulnerable, two are near-threatened and the others have healthy populations.

What are 5 facts about penguins? ›

The Galapagos penguin, one of the world's rarest, sees a glimmer of hope. The Galápagos penguin (pictured on Sombrero Chino Island) is the only penguin that lives at the Equator.

Usually, ancient DNA is badly degraded, but because Antarctica is so cold, specimens were well preserved. The team was able to extract DNA from several penguin generations, including 12 modern penguins and eight ancient penguins that ranged from 250 to 44,000 years old.

The total number of breeding pairs of penguins in the Antarctic region is estimated to be about 20 million.

A nest of eggs is called a clutch, and with the exception of emperor and king penguins, clutches usually contain two eggs. (Emperor and king penguins lay a single egg.) A clutch with more than one egg presents a better chance of at least one chick surviving.

How Many Penguins Are There? There are 30-31 million penguins left which are split across 18 different species. The most common species is the Adelie penguin which has a population of 10 million whilst the smallest population species is the Galapagos penguin which has a population of just 1,200.

This works because they are threatened by very few (if any) land predators. While penguins are vulnerable to skuas and giant petrels flying overhead, in the north they would have fallen prey to foxes, wolves, polar bears – maybe even humans!

"Happy Feet" features three penguin species -- not only emperors ("Mumble") but Adelies ("Ramon") and rockhoppers ("Lovelace"), says Reichert -- and ends with what appears to be a United Nations ban on fishing in Antarctica and plenty of food for all penguins.

The Ross Sea in Antarctica is likely to have been a shelter for emperor penguins for thousands of years during the last ice age, when much of the rest of Antarctica was uninhabitable due to the amount of ice.

Are fairy penguins real? ›

Fairy penguins (Eudyptula minor), also known as little penguins, are tiny, slate-blue animals found along the coastlines of southern Australia and New Zealand.

The world's oldest known penguins existed only a few million years after the mass-extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs – except for birds, the only dinosaurs that didn't go extinct. Some of these earliest penguins had longer legs than their living relatives.

Spotted by tourists, the rare bird has a mutation that dilutes feather pigments. Birds of a feather usually flock together—but not in the case of a rare "white" mutant penguin, spotted Monday in a chinstrap penguin colony in Antarctica. (Watch video of the pale penguin.)

When Martin tested penguins' color vision, he discovered that they do not see red. They do see violet, blue and green. Even though they spend much of their life on land, their eyes are adapted to the underwater world, where they hunt.

Share. The jackass penguin is also known as the African penguin, and each of these common names describes something about the species. It makes a sound similar to a donkey's call, and it is restricted to the waters and rocky shores of southern Africa. In fact, it is in the only species of penguin that nests in Africa.

Conservation status

Since 1988 the blue penguin has been listed as a species of least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species. Ecologists base this classification on the species's high numbers and extremely large geographic range.

The female lays one egg in May or June, transfers the egg to the male, and returns to sea to feed while the male incubates the egg in his brood pouch for about 65 days.

At an aquarium in Spain, two female gentoo penguins became first-time moms in 2020 and spent time raising a baby chick they had adopted as an egg.

Adult male penguins are called cocks, females are hens; a group of penguins on land is a waddle, and a group of penguins in the water is a raft.

Penguins, on the other hand, don't fart. They don't eat high-fibre diets like humans do, and thus have totally different bacteria in their guts - ones that do not produce gas.

Do penguins cry tears? ›

As far as we know, penguins don't cry, at least not like people do.

Penguins eat krill and fish, which makes their poop varying shades from pink to white. The more krill, the pinker it will be. More fish makes the guano whiter.

1. Javan Rhinos. Once found throughout south-east Asia, Javan rhinos have suffered a staggering decline in their numbers due to hunting and habitat loss. The lone wild population of Javan rhinos is one of the rarest of the rhino species—around 75 individuals—which can only be found on the island of Java, Indonesia.

Here at BirdLife, we can't imagine a world without penguins. But despite their charm and worldwide popularity, they are marching toward extinction. Penguins are sadly one of the most threatened groups of seabirds, with half of the 18 species listed by Birdlife as either Vulnerable or Endangered.

Long-term monitoring has revealed a 43% drop over a decade in the number of birds that breed across 52 islands near the Mawson research station. The scientists say the decline is a stark contrast to other Adélie penguin populations in east Antarctica where numbers have been stable or increasing.

A penguin has a heart (muscle), just as humans and mammals, which pumps the blood through the entire body and delivers the necessary oxygen. This heart has 4 chambers, making sure that oxygen-rich blood is separated from the oxygen-poor blood.

When approaching a brooding penguin in its nest, it's best to beware of flying feces. Penguin poo can travel as far as 1.34 meters (about 4.4 feet), a new study finds.

As any penguin lover will know, they are some of the most loyal creatures on the planet. Most breeds of penguin choose a mate and stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Rainbow is a Humboldt penguin - found in Coastal Peru and Chile and named after the explorer Alexander von Humboldt. These penguins need to lose heat, rather than conserve it, and bare patches beside their bills and large wings help do this.

The rarest animal in the world is the vaquita (Phocoena sinus). It is a kind of critically endangered porpoise that only lives in the furthest north-western corner of the Gulf of California in Mexico. There are only 18 left in the world.

Is a yellow penguin real? ›

The rare, yellow-colored penguin was one among a colony of 120,000 king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) living on the remote South Georgia Island, reports Yasemin Saplakoglu for Live Science.

If you needed a reminder that love is alive and penguins are incredible, Sphen and Magic, a pair of male gentoo penguins at Sea Life Sydney Aquarium in Australia, are now the proud fathers of a three-ounce chick.

2 male penguins welcome hatchling as New York zoo's 1st same-sex foster parents The Rosamond Gifford Zoo says Elmer and Lima are its first same-sex parents to successfully hatch an egg, calling the penguins "exemplary in every aspect of egg care."

But these males mate for life, reuniting with the same female year after year during mating season. Despite their monogamous mating patterns, however, the birds really don't spend much time together, according to a new study.

For penguins, the best time for a snooze is the afternoon. The birds sleep more deeply after lunch than during the morning rush hour, a French ecologist has found¹.

African penguins communicate by means of vocalisation and displays. Vocalisation includes loud, donkey-like braying noises as well as barking and growling.

African penguins communicate feelings such as hunger, anger and loneliness through six distinctive vocal calls, according to scientists who have observed the birds' behaviour in captivity.

In fact, penguins and polar bears don't mix. Even though they can live in similar types of habitats, you will never actually find penguins and polar bears living together in the wild. That's because polar bears are found in the Arctic Circle region of the Northern Hemisphere.

"Happy Feet" features three penguin species -- not only emperors ("Mumble") but Adelies ("Ramon") and rockhoppers ("Lovelace"), says Reichert -- and ends with what appears to be a United Nations ban on fishing in Antarctica and plenty of food for all penguins.

Summary: It is difficult to distinguish males from females among King Penguins, but a new study reveals that King Penguins can be sexed with an accuracy of 100% based on the sex-specific syllable pattern of their vocalizations. Using the beak length, King Penguin individuals can be sexed with an accuracy of 79%.

Are black penguins real? ›

All-black penguins are so rare there is practically no research on the subject–biologists guess that perhaps one in every quarter million of penguins shows evidence of at least partial melanism, whereas the penguin we saw appears to be almost entirely (if not entirely) melanistic.

Most breeds of penguin choose a mate and stay with them for the rest of their lives.

We all know that penguins endure and survive freezing temperatures in the Antarctic, these can range as low as -70˚C in the centre to -20 ˚C around the coast. Their bodies stay warm due to their insulating layers of blubber which lies just beneath the skin.

Longtime Alaskans are well familiar with having to explain that there are no penguins in Alaska. Penguins live at the South Pole, not the North Pole. Though penguins are not native to Alaska, a few wayward travelers have made their way north.