Could You Guide This Baby Penguin Through the Impossible Maze?
Down at the bottom of a frozen labyrinth, a baby penguin is looking up at you with total, unearned confidence. It cannot read a map. It cannot spot a trap. It has, however, firmly decided that you can.
Every turn is a small gamble: which tunnel breathes danger, which beam will hold, which lever actually opens the gate. You are not so much moving the penguin as reading the ice on its behalf. Trust the clues, respect the cracks, and keep those little flippers pointed toward daylight. Get it right and you are a hero. Get it wrong and, well, it forgives you already.
See every possible result for this quiz and what each one means →
A bird built like a wetsuit
Emperor penguins breed in the Antarctic winter, which is a peculiar thing for any animal to attempt. The males take a single egg onto their feet, tuck it under a fold of belly skin and stand through months of darkness and wind while the females walk out to open water to feed. None of that works without extraordinary insulation.
Their feathers are short, stiff and packed far more densely than most birds', with down at the base holding a layer of air against the skin, and blubber underneath. Flippers and feet are the weak points, since thinly covered skin sheds heat fast. The vessels running out to them are bundled against the vessels running back, so warm outgoing blood hands its heat over before it reaches the extremity. The same arrangement appears in the legs of wading birds, and it lets a penguin's feet sit close to freezing while its core does not. The wings are useless for flight, being flattened and rigid, and the bird is dense rather than air-filled, which is what allows an emperor to hunt several hundred metres down.
Finding one voice among thousands
A colony has no nests and no fixed addresses. A returning adult, loaded with food, has to locate its own mate or chick among thousands of near-identical birds standing on ice that shifts. It does this by sound. Penguins produce calls using two vocal sources at once, and the beating pattern between them is distinctive enough to identify an individual; chicks learn their parents' signature and answer it.
Playback experiments have shown birds picking their own family's call out of a recording and ignoring everything else, sometimes after weeks apart. The maze is real, in other words. It is simply made of other penguins, and it is solved with ears.
The huddle moves all night, very slowly
When the wind turns serious, emperors pack together at a density that would be intolerable in any other context. The huddle is not static. Time-lapse footage of wintering colonies shows small movements rippling through the mass at intervals of roughly a minute, each bird shuffling a few centimetres, the disturbance travelling outward like a wave. Over hours this circulates individuals from the freezing edge towards the warm middle and back out again, with nothing resembling a queue or an agreed rule.
The quiz below is a bit of nonsense involving a cartoon penguin and has no scientific pretensions at all. The animal it borrows, though, is among the better problem-solvers on the planet, and it does its finest work standing almost perfectly still.
