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Calculating penguins find the right mates

August 20, 1999

French scientists have discovered that king penguins have an innate mathematical ability which helps them find their mates among a crowd of tens of thousands of other penguins.

A paper to be published on 22 August 1999 in the journal Proceedings: Biological Sciences of the Royal Society has revealed that king penguins battle the odds of locating their partners in a huge, noisy colony, amid strong sub-Antarctic winds, by applying the mathematical theory of communication.

The authors say that this is probably the first time it has been scientifically proven that a bird species takes into account the constraints imposed by wind on its acoustic communication.

Their results showed that during windy conditions, which generate a high level of background noise, the penguins increased both the number of calls and the number of syllables per call to improve communication with their mates.

"This result conforms with predictions from the mathematical theory of communication: increased redundancy in a signal improves the probability of receiving a message in a noisy channel," the authors say.

Vocal recognition is crucial to the survival of king penguins. Mates are faithful throughout at least one breeding season and both incubate the egg and rear the chick.

After feeding, one of the mates returns to the breeding area to take over the care of the egg or chick and searches for its partner by using a unique mutual display call. The partner, having fasted for several weeks to protect the young, responds to the call and thereby confirms its identity and its exact position within the colony. Mates are able to recognise each other among thousands of other birds only through this repeated acoustic signalling.

The experiments were conducted by Thierry Lengagne, Thierry Aubin, Jacques Lauga and Pierre Jouventin of the Université Paris Sud and Université Paul Sabatier in France. They spent four weeks observing the behaviour of the penguins in the Crozet archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean.

The study was carried out in the summer of 1995 when the penguins were incubating. During this breeding season, the colony in the site contained 40,000 pairs of king penguins. Thirty pairs were later tagged and their calls recorded and measured. The wind and background noise were likewise measured.

Royal Society, The

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