Rambles with penguins

[shewhomust]

As noted at the time, while I was in London I bought The Penguin Book of Penguins: partly because I was in holiday mood and wanted to buy something, but also because it was such a very neat idea, and such an elegant design (it shouldn't really be orange, of course, which indicates fiction, but let's not be pedantic). And penguins are a regular feature of the Elm Tree Quiz, so really, it was my duty to buy the book...

Author Peter Fretwell is a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey: he has made a specialty of using satellite images to learn about emperor penguin colonies (there's a bit about this is the book; I'd have liked more). Part of his purpose in writing the book is to publicise the many threats to penguins, and this makes for depressing reading: the sensitive reader should be warned that this is a book in which Bad Things Happen to penguins: to individual penguins, some of them young and fluffy; to individual species, threatened by loss of their specialised habitat or competition for their favoured diet; and to the greater family of penguins overall. Less grave, but because this post is mostly about how much I enjoyed this book, I note also that Fretwell's style tries a bit too hard, and that if I had had the editing of this book, the phrase "our little [adjective] friends" would appear less frequently. The material might also have been organised differently, and there would have been an index. It would, in short, have been a different book. Despite all of which...

One of the book's virtues is that it is illustrated with drawings by the author's wife, Lisa Fretwell. I did not feel that she was in any way the lesser contributor: (this author interview with both of them includes her drawing of an Adélie penguin).

Its other great virtue is that it is full of irresistible Penguin Facts. The zoological details are amazing, but inevitably it was the historical / cultural stuff that really set me thinking. Take those Adélie penguins, for example. Peter Fretwell says that the species was named after his wife by Jules Dumont d'Urville, who first discovered this penguin in 1840. Two things bothered me about this statement.

The first was the idea of Dumont d'Urville telling his wife Darling, I discovered these funny little black-and-white flightless birds, and they have such a comical waddle, I called them after you... It turns out that Fretwell is simplifying things, and this is not quite what happened: other sources seem to agree that Dumont d'Urville named Adélie Land (Terre Adélie) in Antarctica for his wife, and someone else named the penguins for the area where they were found.

The other was that as early as 1840, penguins were being differentiated into new species. This is probably just ignorance on my part: I begin to suspect that as new and very scattered colonies of penguins were encountered, it was a natural to assume that each was a different species as to assume that it wasn't. The internet doesn't seem particularly interested in this subject, though there is a talk by historian Ellen Arnold which I need to listen to; also what zeems (as far as I understand it) to be a genome analysis investigating the hstory of the devekopment of the different penguin species. But I was starting from the point at which early explorers identified these birds as "penguins" (Fretwell dates it to 1577, in the log of the Golden Hind, which is so hood I would love it to be true). This suggested that if you weren't bothered about distinguishing penguins from auks, you wouldn't be fussy about differentiating the species of penguins. I now suspwct that this wasn't true, but wandering off in pursuit of more data, I came across an interesting article which entertained me both by coming to the topic with a completely different agenda and because it shares my preferred source of information on historical nature studies. It quotes The Surgeon's Mate:

There were always birds, particular birds, on the Banks, thick or clear.
"What kind of birds? " asked Stephen.
"Murres, dovekies, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, sheerwaters, fulmars, skuas, all sorts of gulls, puffins, penguins - "
"Penguins, my dear sir? " cried Stephen.
"That’s right, Doctor. A very old-fashioned bird, that can't fly but only swim. Some call them garefowl, but we call them penguins. It stands to reason, if a bird can't fly, it is a penguin: ask any whaler that has been far south. "

In Desolation Island (chapter 10), Stephen has already encountered actual penguins (according to this account of Desolation Island itself, probably king penguins), though he seemed more interested in the albatrosses. He just hadn't been expecting to find them in the Arctic...

Literary / linguistic footnote: the French for 'penguin' is not 'pingouin' but 'manchot' (one-armed). Anatole France's L'Île des Pingouins is usually translated as 'Penguin Island' but is actually populated by great auks. The Preface (which may not be included in all translations) has fun with this:

Cela embarrassera peut-être les ornithologistes soucieux de décrire et de classer les palmipèdes; ils se demanderont, sans doute, si vraiment un même nom convient à deux familles qui sont aux deux pôles l'une de l'autre et diffèrent par plusieurs endroits, notamment le bec, les ailerons et les pattes. Pour ce qui est de moi, je m'accommode fort bien de cette confusion.

As far as I'm concerned, I can live very comfortably with this confusion.

I had not previously come across the term which Fretwell uses in the form 'Splitters and lumpers': this seems to be somewhat outnumbered by 'splitters and lumpers' (for example in Wikipedia, which explains:

A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.

Wikipedia traces the terms back to Darwin and beyond, but the dilemma itself is older - I thought of Occam's razor. And as a general rule, 'more in common' has its advantages. Even so, I draw the line at lumping together these two families of irresistable black-and-white flightless bird. But how far can you split penguins? There are currently 18 distinct species, which seems a lot. I wondered whether the isolated habitat, where the absence of predators has allowed the evolution of flightless birds, has also resulted in inbreeding? It matters, apparently, because penguins are so endangered: a species may seem more resilient if not all its colonies are under threat, more vulnerable if the different colonies represent different species. So the choice between lumping and splitting is less about any 'real' difference, and more about what gerrs the best results for the penguins: if you can argue for better protection by dividing the little penguin into multiple species, why wouldn't you? The rockhopper, originally a single species, has already been divided into northern and southern rockhoppers, and there is currently debate about whether there should also be but not eastern rockhoppers. I have no opinion about this, but wish that the internet would let me show you Lisa Fretwell's drawing of a northern rockhopper, which is a thing of beauty. Failing that, just do yourself a favour and do an image search on northern rockhopper penguin.

I have loaned my copy of the book to the Quizmaster. He asks: "But is there a Puffin Book of Puffins?" This is such a good question; why didn't it occur to me?