King Penguin Calls | South Georgia & the Falklands | Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic

This is Gold Harbor, one of the most amazing beaches in the world, full of king penguins. I'm really interested and fascinated by animal communication and how animals use signals and especially acoustic signals. What is fascinating about king penguins or penguins in general is that they need to communicate their identity with basically two other birds, their partner and their chick. And how they do that amongst thousands and thousands of other individuals is so interesting. With this huge amount of penguins it sounds like chaos, but really if you listen closely you are actually able to differentiate males and females by their calls and I can show you how. So that one, that was a male and you can hear the sometimes they call longer, sometimes shorter, but it's going to be the same syllable pattern. And that, that is the female and you can hear that. And anyone can hear the difference if you listen carefully. For example, here's the male again and the female. Do you hear the difference? I started in 2015 with my PhD thesis on king penguin vocalizations and finished in 2018. And so for that I recorded males and females. I took blood samples in order to verify the sex and then I tried to find a pattern in their calls. So basically you have two syllable types, one that looks like an A and one that looks like an M shape in the spectrogram. And we named those syllables A and B and the females will alternate between A and B. They will produce the call A B A B A V, whereas the males will have the same syllables. They will also have A and B syllables, but the arrangement is different. Males will produce calls with a syllable arrangement of A A B A A B A A B. Okay, now you try to identify whether it's a male or a female. And again. That's right, it's a male. Well actually I don't know if you got it right because it's a video, but in any case it just takes a little bit of practice to identify males and females. So this is really interesting because it provides us a new insight into the world of these creatures. Before we could only tell the difference between male and female by looking at subtle size differences, but the problem is that there's so much variation in individuals and also the male and the female would have to stand right next to each other. And of course you can tell the sex, well, when they're.