I'm king of the world! A king penguin's first year at sea

King penguins at Salisbury Plain, South Georgia.
Photo credit: Liam Quinn. Some rights reserved.

ANTARCTICA – You're a young king penguin, out on your own for the first time in the big wide ocean. Where do you go? In the first study of its kind, Klemens Pütz from Antarctic Research Trust and his colleagues used satellite transponders to track juvenile king penguins' first year away from home.

The results, published this month in the open access journal PLoS ONE, showed that the juvenile penguins explored new habitat and eventually learned to find food in similar habitat to their parents.