Whatever your networking poison of choice, there’s a good chance you might have seen some circulating footage of two groups of rockhopper penguins seemingly stopping for a quick chat before parting ways, with one member appearing to be retrieved as it follows the wrong group (if you’ve not had the pleasure, you can witness the comical moment in the video below). The footage was shared early this month on The Southern Barlows’ YouTube channel which regularly churns out insights into life on the Falkland Islands. This remote South Atlantic archipelago is like Glastonbury for rockhoppers (Eudyptes chrysocome chrysocome), with 320,000 breeding pairs flocking to the islands for an annual gathering that lasts from October through to April.
According to a report from Live Science, Klemens Pütz, scientific director of the Antarctic Research Trust in Bremervörde, Germany, has a somewhat anticlimactic explanation for the series of events in the rockhopper video. The first group of fervently hopping penguins are probably on their way to the sea for a spot of fishing, he explains, so it stands to reason that the group they encounter coming from the other direction are on their way home. The confusion begins as the two groups mingle and separate again, with what appears to be one member of Team Fish following Team Home.
As humans it’s easy to anthropomorphize moments such as this (as demonstrated in Bill Bailey’s timeless Love Song), but the reality of animal tête-à-têtes are rarely the Pixar shorts we imagine them to be. Abandon all hope of altruistic penguin friends, ye who read beyond here, because as Pütz explains the video is not what it seems.
"They're just a mixture of penguins. And next time, they're in a completely different group," Pütz said. Rockhoppers are natural followers, and when two groups collide like this there will inevitably be one or two animals who get in a muddle regardless of which direction they were headed. The penguin who appears to turn back and retrieve its buddy is likely also just confused, Pütz continued, and it’s highly unlikely the move was motivated by altruism. "I think it is just coincidence and appears to the human eye as if one of the penguins helps the other and gets him back on track," Pütz said, delivering the final fatal blow to this Falkland Fairytale.
Rockhoppers are highly gifted when it comes to identifying their mates or offspring, picking them out from the hundreds of thousands of near-identical animals that share their nesting grounds. Mating pairs will perform a call-and-response routine, making sounds and movements specific to their beloved. They will greet each other for years, with some animals even meeting annually back at their original nest. So, while this may not be a story of altruistic penguin friendships in the Falklands, it still endorses a love story that's played out in the remote archipelago every year.
[H/T: Live Science]
