How Do Penguins Tell Each Other Apart?

Imagine for a second that you’re an emperor penguin coming back to your colony after a swim. You need to find your mate and your chick, but how? Emperor penguins don’t make nests, so there’s no fixed spot where you can go and expect to meet up with your family. There’s just a huge crowd of penguins standing around on a flat ice sheet. It’s noisy, and, to make matters worse, all the penguins look pretty much identical. How do you figure out who’s who?

Emperor penguins make a special two-voiced call that can be used for individual recognition. The system takes advantage of a quirk in bird anatomy: Birds’ vocal organ, the syrinx, splits into a fork where the trachea connects to the lungs. This allows many bird species to produce two separate voices at the same time.

Emperor penguins use the two branches of the syrinx to produce two different frequencies at the same time, creating a beating amplitude pattern. Scientists have determined that these patterns carry enough individual information for the penguins to recognize each other. (Read the paper here.) The beating pattern can also be discerned more easily than a single-voiced call over the background noise of a penguin colony, and it passes more easily through obstacles (mainly the densely packed crowds of penguins). Previous experiments have shown that when emperor penguins are prevented from vocalizing, they have a hard time recognizing each other as individuals based on visual cues alone.

This identification system has also been observed in king penguins, which, like emperor penguins, carry their eggs on their feet instead of building nests. Species of penguins that build nests don’t seem to use two-voiced calls, since they can find each other by returning to their nesting sites.