These Punk Rock Penguins Have a Bizarre Breeding Strategy

I'm Christopher Intagliata and I work for 60-second science.

The Antipodes Islands are hundreds of miles from New Zealand. The breeding grounds of the world's most punk-rock penguin can be found there.

There is a call from thePenguin

The twins have bleached-blond mohawks.

If you put a penguin's flipper in an electrical outlet, it will get a shock. It looks like that.

The erect-crested penguin has a peculiar breeding strategy according to Lloyd Davis. Two women lay eggs. The first person to die should be left.

The egg is placed on the rock. It's just weird. Forty percent turn their backs on it. It's like they don't care about that.

Davis says that it's unusual because most birds pour resources into the first and second eggs.

If they lose one of the other eggs, they can rear the chick from that one. This is completely different. In this case, they don't favor the first egg, but they favor the second one.

The Antipodes Islands were visited by Davis and his colleagues in 1998. They have narrowed down the possible explanations for this behavior.

The penguins might reject the first egg because it's small, so it's smaller to the second egg. The penguins might be acknowledging that they don't have the resources to rear two babies.

There is a study in the journal. The breeding biology of erect-crested penguins is written byLloyd S. Davis.

The penguins are now in danger.

"They seem to have gone down by about a third based on evidence we have, we know nothing about the causes, and we need to do what we can to protect these wonderful and forgotten penguins."

The birds are already putting all their eggs in a basket.

The Global Penguin Society is based in Puerto Madryn, Argentina.

This is a transcript of the show.