Penguin Plush & Penguin Facts

Oh, to be penguin plush! A warm place to call home, no worries about finding a mate or food, and no need to worry about the care of young chicks. All things considered, penguin plush is just a great thing to be!



The Antarctic is home to the Adelie penguin species where, for a few very short months every summer, they go to land to find a mate and raise their chicks. The coldest place on the planet is not the easiest place to raise a baby and to do it effectively, Adelie's use tag-team parenting to get it done; the eggs are incubated by both male and female penguins in addition to guarding them when looking for food. The males are the first to arrive on land where they lay claim to a territory and then build a nest. Once the females come ashore, mating can begin. But, prior to that, females have to choose their mate. Once done, females lay two eggs and then return to the ocean to bulk up on food. While gone, her male partner babysits the eggs for two weeks, until the female returns. During that time frame, the male never leaves the eggs to go off and feed; with stored fat reserves, the males are able to go without food until their female partner comes back. As is the case, males can lose as much as 20 percent of their body weight through the summer breeding season. If a male has not stored up enough fat, however, he may have to leave the eggs (before the female returns) to go back to the ocean to feed, thus the condition of the male is of utmost importance.



Male Adelie penguins use mating calls to attract prospective mates but researchers have been unsure as to how those courtship calls are used by the females to decide which male will ultimately father their chicks. Emma Marks of the University of Auckland, travelled to Ross Island, Antarctica (the summer home of half a million Adelie penguins), to spend three months both physically weighing and recording male penguin calls with a handheld microphone so as to be able to study how females go about choosing who they will mate with.



The male penguin mating call is done by the male throwing its head back, pointing its beak up to the sky, and then letting out a series of squawks and trills. Marks says they are not musical calls but rather "sound like the cross between a donkey and a stalled car." The discovery by researchers was that males with a certain sound frequency who held a call steady for a period of time, is what tells a female that the male is fat enough thus resulting in successful breeding. Marks explained that it was as if "females were listening to the stability of the call." The males that had the more consistent tone, were chosen as mates at a faster rate than males that did not. As it turned out, these particular males were also the heavier of the bunch and had the most success in raising chicks. The study revealed that a female penguin was able to listen to a courtship call from a male and tell how fat he was and what kind of father he would be.



Penguin plush do have to go through a choosing process of sorts; after all, when sitting on a store shelf, there may be dozens of penguin plush to choose from. Typically, the better looking the soft toy and the one with the most pleasant face, the more likely it is to get picked to go home with you. On the Internet, however, generally a single photograph of penguin plush is all you get to choose from, although you can peruse more than one site before making a final decision. Either way, a choice is always made.



Angeline Hope is a collector of plush giant toys. You can view a selection of plush giant toys, including

penguin stuffed animal toys at MyBigPlush.