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Today on Animal Fact Files we’re discussing macaroni penguins. To start things off we have to have a short history lesson. While you might think the name macaroni penguin comes from the pasta, you would be correct, but how it got there is likely not what you would expect. The term "macaroni" comes from a type of pasta in Italy. In the 18th century young people (mostly men) would travel to Italy and dine on this otherwise unknown cuisine. Some of these people ended up developing or honing a flair for fashion during these trips, and would later be said to be "part of the macaroni club" upon returning home. The term "macaroni" was often used pejoratively to denote folks, again, often men, with a passion for fashion, thus, the fashionable penguin, with its pasta-like crest, was given the common name "macaroni".

Macaroni penguins are just one of about half a dozen living crested penguin species; others include rockhopper, snares, and royal penguins, though there's been debate whether royal penguins should be separated as their own species. Some observations suggest that royal penguins are simply a color morph of macaroni penguins as they're color pattern is sometimes seen far from their main colony and the two groups can hybridize. Apart from their pale-faced relatives, macaroni penguins typically have a dark face, pale belly, red bill and eyes, and pink feet. Of course, their most defining characteristic is the double crest of orange feathers crossing over their eyes like the most fabulous eyebrows the bird world has to offer!

Macaroni penguins are some of the largest crested penguins standing 28 inches (70cm) tall and weighing in at just over ten pounds (4.5kg), though their weight fluctuates throughout the year. These birds love to eat krill, fish like lantern fish, and squid. They chase their food based on the time of day. These prey rise to the surface at night and sink to depths during the day, so the penguins follow suit! At night, macaroni penguins rarely dive deeper than 65 feet (20m), but during the day they'll go as deep as 200 feet (60m) to find food! During some parts of the year, however, they don't eat. Both parents take turns fasting as they incubate their eggs, and after the breeding season all the adults in the colony molt their old feathers and spend almost a month waiting for fresh new feathers to grow back in before they take to the seas again. They can't swim during this time!

Macaroni penguins are colony breeders. They gather in massive, noisy groups that number from the tens to hundreds of thousands of individual birds. They're typically monogamous from season to season, and they nest on rocky ledges of oceanic islands. Macaroni penguins spend their winters at sea and the warmer months at their colonies peppered across various sub-Antarctic islands. As spring arrives, males come ashore about a week before the ladies. They find their partner in the cacophony and build a nest of pebbles and scraped debris atop rocky shores. Macaroni penguins almost always produce two eggs and raise only one chick. The first egg is much smaller than the second and will be discarded as long as the second chick survives, but the first egg ensures the couple produces a chick if something goes wrong with their second egg. 

These birds share incubation duties over the course of just over a month, and then take turns feeding the newly hatched chick for two more months, spending the latter half of that time being less vigilant as the babies form groups to keep themselves safe and warm as opposed to being guarded primarily by the male. Once the chicks leave, the adults head to sea to feast for a few weeks before returning a final time that season to shed their old feathers. If they can avoid threats like fur seals and giant petrels, macaroni penguins may live to be about a decade old.

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