May 2017

There are many questions about penguins. How old can they get? How deep do they dive? Can they tap-dance? (No!)

One question that is also often brought up is: why are penguins black and white?

It seems as if despite the apparent trickyness of this question, a lot of people seem to have an idea. Of course, as a penguin scientist we also have our theories about the topic. And here we want to find out to which extent our theories line up with public ideas as to why penguins have black backs but flash bright white bellies.

Thanks heaps to Kiyomi Ogawa for the Japanese translation of our poll questions!

We will write a blog post about the results and current scientific theories about this simple yet complicated question in a week or two.