#penguin colony

[anam-cara]

Penguins and beaches, South Africa

2023

[travelnshit]

Antarctica Day 5

We were jolted awake at 6.30am by the dulcet tones of Mario over the PA welcoming us to the day. Jesus fucking Christ, Mario! A bit of warning would have been nice! We’d set an alarm for 7.30, I’d gotten up for a wee at about quarter past six all smug that we still had over an hour to snooze in our outlandishly comfortable beds. He was only waking us up to tell us how awful the weather was too,…

[craiglotter]

Penguins and Dassies at Stony Point Colony in Betty's Bay (2021-09-18)

Penguins and Dassies at Stony Point Colony in Betty’s Bay (2021-09-18)

[das-a-kirby-blog]

I want dedede lore now. gRABBING him by the coat. your story cannot be that simple..we have figured out kirby, we are digging into meta knight's background, we can infer with bandana dee, we kicked magolor till he told the truth...now we need to know about you. I will not allow you to be more mysterious than meta knight...

[thepastisalreadywritten]

🤎🐧🤎

[cookiwi-octonauts]

KWAZII FOR AN AU IDEA ASUBAHVHK

Known for his adventurous and daredevil behaviour Kwazii "The Untamed" is recognised as fiercest pirate in the seven seas 🌊

But he is still silly lovely and helps the creatures in danger obviously

[nando161mando]

Pittsburgh police destroy... water.

[proton-wobbler]

Semifinals, Poll 2

Oilbird vs African Penguin

sources under cut

Oilbird (Steatornis caripensis)

"They are the only nocturnal flying fruit-eating birds in the world (the kakapo, also nocturnal, is flightless)" - Wikipedia

eBird sightings: 3,559; IUCN Redlist Rating: Least Concern

What more can I say? Why do they echolocate if they have such good eyes? How does it help with finding and eating fruit? The genus, family, and order name (Steatornis) means "fat bird", in reference to the fatness of the chicks. Apparently there have been fossils of this family found worldwide, but the oilbird is the only survivor, living in northwest South America. Their habitat ranges from lowland to subtropical forests in the Andes, so long as caves and forests with fruiting palms and laurels are nearby.

African Penguin (Spheniscus demersus)

"These guys are such funny bastards. They're like horny toddlers. They loaf. They crave violence. They can swim faster than Michael Phelps." - original poll propaganda

eBird sightings: 3,034; IUCN Redlist Rating: Endangered

Penguins are unable to swim during their molt, as their feathers are not yet waterproof. African penguins typically take three weeks to fully molt and must fast, surviving off of fat reserves; they will lose up to half of their body weight during that time. They will live at sea for most of their lives (10-25 years), coming to land when it is time to lay their eggs. Oh also they're called Jackass Penguins because they bray like donkeys.

Images: Oilbird (Andres Vasquez Noboa); Penguin (Dorian Anderson)

[daisychainsandbowties]

I just want a factually accurate, incredibly detailed Palmer station in winter in Antarctica fic where Lilith and Beatrice are no nonsense researchers and Camila and Ava and all nonsense maintenance/mechanics people with incredibly well written smut for both ships to magically appear out of thin air. C’mon, universe, help me out…

okay okay okay okay but listen beatrice is there to study heliophysics for nasa. she’s as usual a fucking science nerd supreme & if you ask her about the heliopause or voyager 1 well i hope you brought snacks because she’s not remotely normal about solar wind fizzling out against interstellar wind & the small influence (cosmologically) of the brightest thing we know.

ava is the station mechanic & also a pilot & a professional alpinist. big fan of penguins. her & bea meet when Ava slides off the roof of the bio-building & ends up dangling upside-down in her harness waving to a flummoxed bea through the window.

lilith is a marine biologist and glaciologist & cam is part of her dive-team. they’re weird and soft and lilith is like a stork in a lab coat when cam is around (clumsy) but she’s also… constantly in a wet suit or in a lara croft-type fit because biologists are Like That so cam is playing it cool but like… wants to fuck this strange woman who gets emo over the melting ice caps.

help anon you’re testing my whisker-thin resolve to not start any more aus

[queering-ecology]

Chapter 3--Penguin Family Values: the nature of planetary environmental reproductive justice by Noel Sturgeon

Sturgeon’s article opens in a discussion of the award-winning nature documentary The March of the Penguins and how the animal was simultaneously adopted by “right-wing fundamentalist Christians in the United States as an inspiring example of monogamy, traditional Christian family values, and intelligent design” & was becoming “a symbol of the naturalness of gay marriage”  to others(102)—Tango Makes Three (a children’s book based on ‘gay’ penguins at the Central Park Zoo who raised an egg—naturalness and success of gay marriage for raising children). “Queer families turn out to be just the same as straight families. […] they’re determined by nature” 117

Another example of penguins and reproduction in media—Happy Feet—singing/dancing and themes of normalcy. Homosociality and references of homosexuality but ���always flavored with the kind of liberal tolerance covering over ultimate rejection that is  thin veneer for heterosexist anxiety”. And ultimately, the main character’s differences are settled when he ends up ‘happily ever after’ in a heterosexual and successfully reproductive nuclear family.

“Penguins (along with polar bears) became popular symbols of what we would lose to global warming. Relatively invisible in the public cultural arena in contrast, were the growing and unequal effects of the pollution of our atmosphere on marginalized human beings such as indigenous peoples in the Arctic regions, who are struggling to preserve their cultures and societies in the face of rapid climate change” (102).

The author uses the term “Environmental Reproductive Justice” as a way of connecting environmental issues with social justice issues. This builds off insights by feminists of color and Global South feminists who tend to argue for the term ‘reproductive justice’ over ‘reproductive rights’—not just the ability to control pregnancy but also the need for childcare, health care, prenatal care, freedom from coerced sterilization, healthy environments, clean air, food and water, adequate housing, etc (103)

Living environmentalism-reproduction as necessarily about the intertwined reproduction of the environment, communities, and individuals (Giovanna Di Chiro, 2008)

How we reproduce—whether we are reproducing people, families, cultures, societies, and/or the planet—is politicized in several layered and contradictory ways (103). Gender and sexuality are often ignored as part of explanations when examining contemporary political and economic systems. I.e. when exploring the contradictions inherent in the right-wing—“far right conservatives have been able to mobilize low-income people on their side even though the political and economic policies working-class people are asked to support are contrary to their own class interests” (frank 2004)—gender roles and reproductive labor are not oft explored as ways they've been able to inspire feelings of fear, anger, oppression=abortion, ‘vulgarity’ in popular culture, homosexuality (I would also add transsexuality/transgenderism now), family values…all centered around gender expectations, driven by changes in economic practices in a globalizing economy (104)

“The politics of gender are often both the politics of reproductions and the politics of production—the intertwined ways that people produce more people, manage bringing up children, figure out how to do the work at home at the same time as the work that brings in a paycheck, decide how and where to buy food, clothing, shelter, and transportation, take care of elders, and create and maintain all of the social institutions that surround this work. And all of this is central to whether or not our ways of living cause environmental degradation.” (104)

“Heterosexual culture achieves much of its metacultural intelligibility through the ideologies and institutions of intimacy…First, its conventional spaces presuppose a structural differentiation of ‘personal life’ from work, politics, and the public sphere. Second, the normativity of heterosexual culture links intimacy only to the institutions of personal life, making them the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development…intimate life is the endlessly cited elsewhere of political public discourse, a promised haven that distracts citizens from the unequal conditions of their political and economic lives, consoles them for the damaged humanity of mass society, and shames them for any divergence between their lives and the imitate sphere that is alleged to be simple personhood” (Berlant and Warner, 1998 553) (105)

Heterosexist arguments are binary (homosexuality vs heterosexuality, ‘opposites attract’, ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’) and normative (heterosexuality is better, more natural, more moral, more normal, more wholesome, better for parenting). So social institutions are structured in a way that privileges heterosexual sexual practices and solidifies what a family should look like; who does the domestic work; how women/men should act, look, behave; how life should be maintained (producing heterosexuality) (105) These heterosexist arguments are usually about preserving and reproducing particular forms of family, social power, and economic practice.

Pro-life/pro-family—not just about preventing abortions, but about the reproduction of a certain historically and culturally specific idealized family form; father is authority; mother is helpmate and childcare provider; several children living in a framework of Christian, religious, patriarchal, heterosexual, nationalistic, U.S. and nuclear—right-wing. “The family acts as a miniature welfare state, modulating consumption, curbing excess desires, improvising child care and providing social security—[…]it is the dreamworld conveyed in the…’serious’ media…where the conservative variant of the neoliberal utopia is attributed to the biologically fixed ‘nature’ of desire (Lancaster 2003, 336) (106)

Fear of allowing women (especially young women, especially women of color, especially poor women—ESPECIALLY young, poor, women of color) have access to choices and support for their own reproductive decisions and thus forming families that do not adhere to the right-wing model…..divinely created=natural, normal so all else is unnatural and opposite of divine

This particular family model especially when located in a suburban, consumer economy dependent on extremes of global inequality, might be an important origin of our present environmental problems. (107)

Nuclear family model relies on women’s unpaid domestic labor (childcare, eldercare), using nonrenewable fuel-intensive transportation such as cars and long-distance shipping of consumer products, women as shoppers/consumers—these stores are part of globalized production and distribution chains dependent on exploitation of the labor of the poor (global south and often women) (107)

Environmental health is centrally important to reproduction as well as production (107) Reproduction is a materialist and a planetary issue—all reproduction comes with consequences for the global environment, economies and social practices.

Planetary reproduction and environmental reproductive justice

Deconstructing Polar Opposites: Endangered Peoples, Endangered Cultures, Endangered Natures

Missing from the conversation is the immediate threat to numerous groups of people especially vulnerable to climate change by reason of geography, poverty, or political discrimination (documentaries that use images of penguins and polar bears to dramatize the consequences of melting polar ice fail to mention the impact on Arctic Indigenous peoples…)

Indigenous people are not penguins, endangered tribal cultures are not endangered species—racist and the parallel trope of the ‘disappearing Indian’ discounts and obscures the struggle of real indigenous peoples to exist and successfully transform their cultures strategically for survival. Arctic indigenous tribes may be threatened by climate change but they are resilient and experienced in resisting threats to their people… (119)

“We’ve adapted in the past, which is why we are still here” (Chickaloon Grand Chief Gary Harrison, 2005)

Arctic Indigenous peoples have been addressing the problem and suggesting solutions for many years because they knew the threats they faced were early warnings for the people around the world.

“All of this will have a profound impact on the viability of indigenous cultures throughout the North and further afield. Everything is connected in nature; what happens in Alaska will affect all other places of the world as a cascading effect, as scientists call it, will occur” (Cochran 2007) (120)

The possibility of losing indigenous knowledge along with the animals and ice….Subsistence living is part of cultural survival and an important method for keeping the world in balance (Harry Bower Jr. 121) The environment is part of a larger universe with moral and cultural aspects that are maintained by the practices of indigenous peoples who have lived on the land for thousands of years (121)

The expansive knowledge [indigenous people have] about sustainable practices, whether it was supported by scientific expertise or traditional experience, was knowledge that arose from a particular way of life, one that needed to be respected and maintained. It was not knowledge gained from the mystical identity of being Ecological Indians, but was rather sophisticated information needed now by all those, Indigenous or not, trying to understand and address climate change (121)

The reproduction of industrialized economic systems, particularly by the United States and other Western countries, has consequences for planetary ecological workings on a global scale as well as on the scale of communities, families, and species, determining the ability of animals, families and cultures to reproduce in healthy and sustainable ways (122)

Too Many People, Too Few Penguins

The concept of over-reproduction and over population are inherently problematic. Human reproduction (especially that of the poor, immigrants, and people in the Global South), is depicted as a major environmental problem…some environmentalists argue against having children at all.

The “Other” population is portrayed as the central problem environmentally and socially whereas “Our” society (developed industrialized societies) are made invisible.

We encourage ‘other’ societies to engage in family planning, education for women, birth control access among other things while ignoring how the US often prioritizes abstinence only programs rather than birth control for their own population, among failing to provide support for women when they do become pregnant (this article was written prior to roe v wade being overturned. But I bet that would be in this article now…)

“When environmentalists sound warnings about overpopulation, they are usually expressing fears over the reproduction of (poor) nonwhite people, not of white people, whose populations in all Western countries are in decline (but whose consumption habits generally are not). Calls for educational fixes to inform ‘populations’ about why they should want to bear fewer children advance an imperialist cultural agenda that demands that nonwhite people adopt the cultural, social, and economic practices and systems of organization dominant in Western countries (e.g. the prototypical nuclear family), while blaming the ‘foolishness’ of Third World men and women (since the solution is Western education) for environmental degradation. (Gosine 2005, 80-81) (126)

Environmental Justice Family Values

“We are not outside the earth looking down upon it. Instead, we are inside specific biosystems and complex relationships with other biological entities; we impact and are impacted by the interrelationships of those entities. Responsibility to these ecological niches, networks and dynamics can be brought into view only if we understand ourselves as animals among other animals, with varied sexualities, complicated family relationships, complex political systems, and multiple desires. Perhaps we are peculiar animals with astounding abilities, but we are still part of an interconnected world and thus answerable to it” (129)

[erebusvincent]

A fact about me is that I love penguins. I’m busy depleating Cape Town of its penguin merch at this moment.

Check out more penguins:

[potato-jem]

wasn’t expecting to be upset about gay penguins today, but here we are

[astrowhiskers]

Awkward

Guys nobody told me there were penguins on the lunar colony too... the ONE time I decide to wear this shirt this happens. Look, on any other day i'd be happy to see one but these guys must be super smart. Who gave him the little helmet and backpack? Can he talk?? someone please let me know i'm too scared to look like an idiot saying hi and all i get back is a honk or two

[riddle-me-ri]

I have a question how do you think the penguins would react to their s/o being a sailor mouth? Like just cursing alot even when they're happy or excited. I want to know because I curse alot too. :P

Okay so, so sorry it took so long to get back to this. I first read this as like a request but then realize it was more of just a general question lmao.

So I'm just gonna answer normally with my thoughts, cause one I couldn't get it out of my head (I too have a sailor mouth) and plus...I just felt like I needed to upload something and this is a little change of pace. Hope you don't mind!

Arkhamverse Penguin: definitely finds it amusing. may tease you about it even though he has no room to talk.

Reevesverse/Farrell Penguin: he's honestly shocked at first. he couldn't imagine such a sweet face could say such things. when he realizes it's more or less how you show your enthusiasm it, now he aims to get that excitement from you every time.

Gotham Penguin: he's flabbergasted. the last thing he expected, but if anyone knows anything about impulsive emotions it's him, so he can't judge too much.

BTAS Penguin: *le gasp* such language! you're far too precious to have such jargon pass through your lips! oswald understands being excited, but please...

TNBA Penguin: much like btas, he's shocked when he first hears it. he finds it very uncouth. he understands it sometimes can't be helped, but don't be surprised at the disapproving glare he gives you.

Telltale Penguin: oz thinks it's absolutely adorable. such strong language from such a cute little face. makes quite a humorous juxtaposition.

One Bad Day Penguin: oz adores it. much like reevesverse penguin, he'll go out of his way to ensure he gets that reaction out of you every time. knowing he's one of the few that can do it. it makes him feel special, plus seeing you happy and excited warms his heart.

The Batman (2004) Penguin: likely to teach you some more choice words, or better yet, you two may just come up with your own. either way he loves it, it's one of the things you two have in common.

Batman Unlimited Penguin: much like BTAS and TNBA he's extremely taken aback. he blushes unsure how to react or respond, but he's always pleased to see you so enthusiastic about something.

[anam-cara]

Boulders Beach, South Africa

2023

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Source: New Scientist

Scientists spot previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica

25 January 2024

Scientists have spotted previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in new satellite imagery.

At least some emperor penguins are moving their colonies as melting ice from climate change threatens breeding grounds.

The British Antarctic Survey said Wednesday that the four newly found colonies likely existed for many years, but scientists hadn’t previously spotted them.

Emperor penguins are considered “near threatened” with extinction and live in Antarctica.

While the newly spotted colonies don’t greatly change overall population estimates, they help scientists understand where penguins might be moving.