Swimming with penguins in the wild is a mind-blowing experience. When the ‘mini torpedoes’ hurtle past, you can barely make out the animals’ shape, let alone their movements. This was the problem faced by Hiroto Tanaka and colleagues from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, as they tried to understand how penguins swim; their movements are supremely swift. And even though researchers have a sense of how penguins overcome buoyancy, no one had successfully visualised how the birds use their wings to propel themselves through water; do they flap like inflexible paddles, or flex and bend as they sweep through the water? Intrigued by this mystery, Tanaka, Natsuki Harada, Takuma Oura and Masateru Maeda travelled to the Nagasaki Penguin Aquarium, Japan – home to nine species ranging in size from king penguins to little penguins – to find out how gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) move beneath the waves.
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