I knew they were birds so of course they have feathers but for some reasons I thought they would look more like seals with lots of fat.
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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They have that too, but less of it.
The feathers work almost like a dry suit. Trapping a layer of air to insulate their bodies and keep them exceptionally warm, even as they swim into water that's below freezing temps.
They can't dive as deep though. Air is compressibly by the quickly increasing water pressure, so the cold will sap their body heat faster as a penguin dives deeper.
Fat isn't compressible, so seals don't suffer the same problem.
Fat isn't compressible
How disrespectful to yoga pants
It's true though, the pants can push it into a different shape, but not make it smaller.
If the water is bellow freezing temps wouldn't that mean that the water is ice? Or can it go bellow freezing in the ocean because of the salt?
Yes.
Ocean water can also be supercritical. You can find videos on youtube of under-ice water flash-freezing out from a nucleation site.
Did they hurt the penguin to get that sample?
His condition is stable
Death is the most stable condition.
Baseline obs haven't changed in a hundred years
This is a very old sample of penguin skin in a museum. But to answer your question, yes, they killed the bird.
Not before torturing him first. How else would he give up his insulating secrets.
poor penguin =(
It died peacefully after a life that was longer and happier than average, surrounded by loved ones, and having come to terms with its mortality beforehand.
Thank you
Is it going to be OK?
Yes they just borrowed its skin for a while, it was happy to be involved
Hypothetically, how many penguins would one have to sneak out of the zoo in order to fashion themselves a penguin coat?
Nice try Cruella
So the black coat is actually fluffy?
It would be interesting to know their internal temperature at -60°C ambient.
I bet the locals will give you looks coming all the way to Antarctica to put thermocouples up penguin butts, but hey, science.
The locals on Antarctica are all scientists. I'm sure they would understand.
I'm pretty sure they are already doing it for fun anyway. The more the merrier!
Can we like, nsfw tag images of splayed out penguin skin?
Well, it looks more like leather and as terrible as this practice is, society very much encourages displaying leather.
Just because something is normalised doesn't mean it should be, or that we don't have the capacity to do things differently or more compassionately :3
Yes, but as much as I despise people wearing dead animals, I also don't think it's that awful to see something like that in a scientific context on the internet.
This isn't a scientific context it's a social media site :/ and I'm not asking them not to post it or cancelling them for it - I'm asking that they slap a nsfw tag on it or a content warning or something
For me NSFW is something that can get me fired if somebody sees it on my screen during working hours or something that can put the consumer of the content at risk, like gore images making hemophobic people faint. I can see how this image can be a bit disturbing, but I don't think a piece of leather should be censored, as it dilutes the meaning for the tag too much.
I'd then click on something NSFW thinking there is just another piece of leather with feathers under the tag... I don't think I need to explain this one.
I mean yeah but Lemmy doesn't have other tags that blur the image so we gotta make do. And if you pair the nsfw tag with a content warning like "CW: penguin skin" then nobody is confused as to what they'll see if they unblur
Systems built on unspoken rules break outside of isolated communities, considering this is very much a global community, I doubt such a system would work in the first place. Would be actually cool to have various degrees of warning tags to then choose on the client side what to unblur automatically and what not to, though.
I'm not asking for a system, or a standard. I'm speaking to one person about one post and asking for compassion. Lemmy features would be cool, wider adoption of content warnings would be cool, but neither are what I'm asking for
I work in a penguin museum
So do we have extreme weather gear based on similar principles and layout, or have we discovered a configuration that works better?
Most wearable insulation works pretty similar, right?
Its a layer of air, trapped in some kind of matrix, so that it can't move, with some sort of inner and outer shell.
I think it would be too fragile for most purposes. Unless you can make missing feathers grow back like a living penguin it would wear out quite fast.
Not yet but hopefully soon because penguin coats are really expensive.
Ever Mr Burns has to make do with real gorilla chest:
damn it, now I want to pet a penguin