Adopt an Adorable Penguin Buddy — What Kind of Pet Parent Are You?
A small, extremely round penguin has decided you are his person now. He cannot be reasoned with. He requires meals, entertainment, emotional support at strange hours, and someone to blame when the ice tray goes missing. Congratulations on your new dependent.
How you handle him says more about you than any job interview ever could. Feed him, comfort him, survive his opera phase, and this quiz will file you under one of five pet-parent styles — complete with a verdict you can forward to anyone who has ever watched you try to keep a houseplant alive.
See every possible result for this quiz and what each one means →
The father who stands still for two months
Emperor penguins breed through the Antarctic winter, which is every bit as strange as it sounds. The female lays one egg, passes it carefully to the male, and walks back to open sea to feed. He balances it on his feet beneath a fold of skin called the brood patch and stands there for roughly two months of darkness and blizzard, eating nothing and shedding a large fraction of his body weight before she returns with food for the chick.
There is no nest, because there is nothing on the ice to build one from. The entire arrangement depends on the egg never touching the ground.
A huddle that behaves like a fluid
Thousands of males pack together for warmth at densities where no individual can simply walk where it likes. Researchers filming colonies from above discovered that the huddle is anything but static. Small movements by a few birds propagate outwards as travelling waves every ten to twenty seconds or so, gradually reorganising the group so that birds stranded on the freezing outer edge work their way towards the middle. The study describing it, by Zitterbart and colleagues, draws the comparison with traffic jams.
Nobody is coordinating any of this. It emerges from each bird taking one small step towards its neighbour, and the effect is that a colony shares out the worst positions without any bird intending to be fair.
Finding your own chick among thousands
Without a nest site to return to, a parent arriving back from the sea has no address to head for. Recognition is done entirely by voice. Penguin calls come from a syrinx with two independently vibrating sources, producing a two-voiced signal whose beat pattern survives the racket of a colony, and chicks and parents learn each other's calls precisely enough to reunite inside a moving crowd.
The cartoon penguin above asks for considerably less. He wants snacks, attention and somebody to blame, and the parenting label he issues at the end is entertainment rather than assessment, though the real birds do set an intimidating standard for the tough-love category.
