How long could you stand on Antarctic ice before your bare feet froze solid? A minute, maybe two? If you're an emperor penguin, you can do it for two months, and in wind chills as low as -75 degrees Fahrenheit (-59.4 degrees Celsius). Those naked bird feet may look positively frigid, but their special circulation acts as a kind of antifreeze to keep them just warm enough that they don't freeze. Penguins often swim and feed in groups, but some may dive for prey alone. Emperor penguins have been observed feeding in groups with coordinated diving. Serrezer MC, Holland MM, Stroeve J (2007) Perspectives on the Arctic’s Shrinking Sea-Ice Cover. Science 315 5818. Due to their longer lifespan, penguins may take three to eight years to reach sexual maturity. Some smaller species may begin breeding at three or four, while the larger species do not reach sexual maturity until later. They might look a bit clumsy on land, but penguins are brilliant swimmers. Emperor penguins have the deepest and longest dives for any bird, often reaching depths of over 200 metres. One bird has been recorded at a depth of 565 metres.

Emperor penguins can stand up to 4ft tall and are famed for their extreme parenting methods, with pairs of males and females taking turns to shelter their eggs in brutally cold conditions while the other forages for food. While the penguins have an almost comically ambling gait on land, they are skilled operators on the sea ice and water where they hunt for fish and crustaceans. While only the emperor and Adélie penguins live in Antarctica, many other species reside near the continent on subantarctic islands.Penguins: a group of aquatic flightless birds that live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere. The emperor is the largest living penguin species standing around 115cm tall. Once they have found a partner they usually mate for life and work together to keep their young fed and safe.

It is “unprecedented,” Fretwell and his co-authors wrote, to see total breeding failure across an entire region. And the future looks even more bleak. Similarly, in Argentina, intense and frequent storms are affecting the Magellanic penguins. A 2014 study found that rainstorms and extreme temperatures were the leading causes of death for young penguins from 1983 to 2010. Over the same period, penguin numbers dropped by 20% while the number of storms rose during each nesting season. There are 18 species of penguins that live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, with only one species, the Galápagos penguin, found north of the Equator. The phenomenon may be recent phenotypic plasticity as regional climate change affects parts of the Antarctic coastline.The ability of emperor penguins to change their breeding platform when fast ice conditions deteriorate may be an important adaptation that could help the species survive in a warming environment. Although regional warming has led to loss of ice-shelves around the Antarctic Peninsula [21] ice-shelves are less sensitive to a warming environment and react to warming on slower timescales than sea-ice, the extent, stability and seasonality of which can change rapidly with warming temperatures as already seen in the Arctic [25], [26], [27], [28] and in the west Antarctic Peninsula [8].