The Penguin's Sky Is the Sea. Every Egg Drags It Back Ashore

💰 Support the channel: USDT TRC20: TBebXWjFeAJHfArVsJvt8N6Yv5rvn4GXP7 Darwin wrote that a penguin's little wings are used as fins. He was wrong. A penguin's wing has the same bones as a gull's, it pushes on the upstroke and the downstroke, and under the surface the bird is still flying, just through a sky about eight hundred times thicker than air. The catch is that no bird can lay an egg in the water, so every year the best flyer in the ocean has to come ashore, where it is slow, clumsy and exposed. This video follows that flight plan. Why a seabird can't keep both skies, measured on the thick-billed murre, which pays the highest cost of flight ever recorded in a vertebrate. The earliest penguins, a 340-pound giant from New Zealand and a reddish brown one from Peru. The great auk, the North Atlantic bird that carried the name penguin first and was wiped out in 1844. Emperor penguins diving 1,850 feet on one breath, slowing their hearts to three beats a minute and launching onto the ice on a coat of bubbles. Then the landing: the waddle that turned out to be efficient, the penguins that push each other into the sea, red pebbles stolen nest to nest in 1911, guano burrows dug away for fertilizer, the emperor fathers who fast for 115 days in the dark, a thermal camera that shows penguins colder than the Antarctic air, colonies counted from space, and an Australian housing estate removed house by house for the smallest penguin of all. 👍 Subscribe for a new wildlife documentary every week. #penguin #penguins #emperorpenguin #wildlife #wildlifedocumentary #animalfacts #naturedocumentary #antarctica #birds #seabirds #greatauk #evolution #animalbehavior #oceanlife #natureeducation