I said that penguins had to be fast to catch fish and leap up out of the water and onto the ice. But there is another reason. They have to be able to escape predators.
Many years ago I was a wildlife guide in the Antarctic. One day I was taking a group of tourists ashore in a boat when something quite surreal happened. I had just paused the boat to allow photographs to be taken when, suddenly, the sea beside me erupted and a penguin came flying through the air and landed in the boat. I don’t know who was more surprised, the penguin or me. Clearly, it had thought that we were an ice floe.
So what was that all about? As the penguin launched itself out of the sea, there was a massive swirling motion in the water and I spotted the huge fanged jaws and small black eyes of a leopard seal. It was so close I could smell its breath. It made a noise like someone trying to clear his throat and then sank back into the deep.
That was a very lucky penguin. Leopard seals (or sea leopards) eat penguins and were it not for us that bird would have been quickly eaten. As elsewhere in the world, nature can be brutal.
Although the Adélies are thriving around eastern parts of Antarctica, there are places along the western coast of the continent where they are dying out because of climate change. Adélies do not nest on the ice like the emperors. They nest near the shore during summer when the ice recedes and exposes areas of land. One of the problems is rainfall.
