Penguins

Penguins are flightless black and white birds at Sea World. You can see them indoors and outdoors.

It’s a well known fact that penguins are not like most other birds. These highly specialized birds are adapted to living at sea — spending as much as 75% of their lives at sea. Its true they cannot fly; instead they swim through the sea at amazing speeds using their “wings” as flippers.

Shiny feathers uniformly overlap to cover a penguin’s skin, much like shingles on a roof. Penguin feathers are short, broad, and closely spaced. This helps keep water away from the skin. Penguins have more feathers than most other birds, with about 100 feathers per square inch. Penguins for the most part breed in large colonies, the exceptions being the Yellow-eyed and Fiordland species; these colonies may range in size from as few as a 100 pairs for Gentoo Penguins, to several hundred thousand in the case of King, Macaroni and Chinstrap Penguins.

