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It is a complete falsehood that if a penguin does not find love, it waddles off to die alone.

I was horrified when I first saw this, and since I couldn’t find anything else on the internet about it, I reached out to Dr. Dees Boersma at the University of Washington and asked her about this claim.

She told me that she has 33 years of data and has observed pairings that have stayed together for as long as sixteen years. She also told me that penguins can get ‘divorced’ when not successful at mating, and that they will most likely will ‘divorce’ if not hatched. There is also a major gender skew of more males than females. If a male wants a mate, he HAS to have a nest set up. Furthermore, females don’t come ashore unless they are going to mate. So some females will skip breeding season if they are not in a mating mood.

For example, a female she studied had skipped pairing with her male for a year. The male looked for another mate didn’t find one, and then the next year she was back with him. They do have emotions and they do vary in aggressiveness over a lifetime.

Furthermore, because there are many more males than females, a lot of males have never gotten mates. One of the penguins they’ve studied, “Turbo”, a Magellan penguin, has not had a mate in 14 years and he keeps on trying.

So penguins do not, in fact, waddle off to die if they do not find a mate.

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